Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The All-Girls Filling Station Reunion by Fannie Flagg

This book was sent to me by my dear Aunt Mary and she was right, I absolutely loved it! It was one of those books that makes me sad when I near the end of it because I'm so enthralled with the story line and the characters that I never want it to end! It also had so many twists and a surprise ending. The plot alternates between two sets of characters that come together in the end. One set is a 69 year old woman named Sookie and her family who live in present-day Alabama, the other is an immigrant family named the Jurdabalinski's who live in Wisconsin during the 1940's. Sookie is a very sweet, very Southern woman, who unexpectedly finds out she was adopted as a baby and that "Winged Victory" (her eccentric mother) is not her mother at all. Through various covert contacts, Sookie discovers her mother was a WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilots) during WWII, the first women in history to fly America's military aircraft. This is quite a surprise for kind, soft-spoken Sookie to be directly related to such brave women. As she discovers more about her past, Sookie is able to redefine her view of herself and gain the confidence she has always lacked.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

The Light Between Oceans

Hey! A blog post! It's been more than a year, but I just finished a book and wanted to write about it.

I had heard about this book, that it was really good, but had no idea what it was about. I love doing that, just reading something with no expectations. 

However, this book is about a baby girl. And I just had a baby girl. So it ripped my heart out. I cried so much! 

It's a story about a married couple, Tom and Isabel, who are keepers of a lighthouse on a tiny island off the Australian coast. Isabel has had three miscarriages and is just aching for a baby, they are all by themselves on the island and only go to shore like every two years or something. One day, just two weeks after she loses a baby at seven months pregnant, a rowboat washes ashore with a dead man and a baby girl in it. They bury the man, and clean up the baby, and Isabel convinces her husband to keep the baby and not report what happened, because they can just pretend it was theirs, since she came so soon after her miscarriage. 

But after a while, they hear a story from the mainland about a woman whose husband and baby were lost at sea, and that she is still holding out hope that they will be found. So now they know who the baby's real mother is, and have some hard decisions to make...I don't want to give away any more than that. But it is so good, and so heartbreaking!