Tag: family

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The River Queen, by Stephenia H. McGee, 2023, The Vine Press, Ebook

The River Queen plunges readers into the scenario of American rivers a hundred years ago, when travelling theatres on luxurious boats brought entertainment to cities and towns along their routes. It sounds so fun!

The story features pirates, smuggling, and amusing and dastardly characters of all sorts. Marijuana, then called muggles, was starting to come to the States from Mexico.

Stephenia McGee keeps it light, amusing, and mysterious, with romance in the forefront. Click here to view my comments on other books by her: https://pearladapridham.com/?s=Stephenia+McGee

I read The River Queen as an E-book, but I must admit I much prefer paperbacks. To hold a book in my hands, smell the paper, and look again and again at the beautiful cover really contributes to my enjoyment. So, here is the Amazon link to the paperback: https://www.amazon.com/River-Queen-Christian-Historical-Romances/dp/1635640687/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1PDFURGZMTS7W&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.D66bsqaE7tOf1MlDhdD61wlwibee7pcRMnb4uwrpaL0UO4ZsSEhnzZ0ehZXxQZKlTokhxF8Lm7k9K-b3GlHwzXmd8DRq479WgdQlxunsKAo.1442iwEo4iUQQnn5jGwnjyzVvUgFscVko8sh-bki9wE&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+river+queen+stephanie+mcgee&qid=1713464899&sprefix=The+River+Queen%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1#detailBullets_feature_div.

Or, download the E-book and read from your cell phone whenever you have a few minutes of down time. Though it may not be as satisfying, it’s definitely more convenient. Personally, I find it not as easy to keep track of characters that way. With a paperback in hand, it’s easy to flip back to where they first came on the scene and refresh your memory. Pros and cons…

I hope you enjoy the story as much as I did.

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Ed’s Hopeful Journey, by Pearl Ada Pridham, 2024, Winged Publications

Ed’s Hopeful Journey, Book One of the Love Shines Through series. Prequel to Something I Haven’t Told You.https://www.amazon.ca/Hopeful-Journey-Love-Shines-Through-ebook/dp/B0CW1H26G6/ref=sr_1_1?

Ed’s Hopeful Journey is a short novel, prequel to Something I Haven’t Told You, and takes place five years earlier.

Do you like a grumpy man trope? Like in A Man Called Ove? If so, you might like this.

If you read Something I Haven’t Told You, you probably noticed the self-centered, sour nature of Alison’s father, Ed. Especially at the beginning of the story. But underneath, deep in his heart, there’s another side to him.

In this story, he receives an emergency call that sends him on a journey, hoping to restore lost relations. But Canada is a big country, mostly rural. Travel can present crazy inconveniences. Frustrations come in many forms. Will Ed find grace to overcome?

Ed’s Hopeful Journey works as a stand-alone, but also has connections to Something I Haven’t Told You. The two books don’t have to be read in order. It’s only 34 pages on Kindle. Unfortunately that means it will not be published in paperback. I hope you’ll enjoy it! Spoiler Alert: It can be a tear-jerker. There is tragedy. But “Love Shines Through”, hence the name of the series.

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The Last Way Home, by Liz Johnson, 2022, Revell (Baker Publishing Group)

A Hockey Player Returns Home

The Last Way Home
The Last Way Home

The Last Way Home tells the story of Eli Ross, an NHL hockey player who returns home to Prince Edward Island after more than a decade away.

It’s complicated. Why had he never returned, even for a visit, before now? I don’t want to spoil it for readers by giving away reasons.

Will his brothers and mother accept him? He doesn’t expect them to, but he has nowhere else to go.

And then there’s Violet Donaghy, a young lady who, he finds, his family has taken under wing as a family member. She’s cold to him, and extremely secretive. Which he can’t blame her for. After all, he’s not telling anyone his own secrets either.

No sooner does he arrive home, than a disaster occurs, and he decides to prove his integrity by pitching in to help. Helping Violet is like trying to help a snarling cat. But he ignores the snarling and persists. You’ll have to read it to see how that goes.

Plot and Writing Style

The plot seems to fit into a Prodigal Son trope. Both Eli and Violet carry a lot of angst resulting from years of hidden guilty feelings.

Despite his unrelenting efforts, Eli seems to be stuck on a train headed for doom. Will he be able to ditch it in the end?

The story is compelling, but it took me reading on a ways before I began to really like it. Revell asked me for an honest review, so here you have it. To be honest, I’m wondering whether authors these days are trying so hard to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, or to stay in a ‘deep point of view’, that the reader is left feeling a bit boggled at times. For example, instead of simply saying that a character felt anxious, we read that her stomach hit the floor. The first time this happened in the book, it took me a while to figure out whether it was literal or a figure of speech. And that was just the start. Both main characters really had problems with their stomachs dropping, hitting the ground, sinking or twisting.

The Last Way Home causes one to rethink secrets along with Eli and Violet. Is divulging them the best thing to do? Or could it cause more harm than good?

Learn more about the author and her books at LizJohnsonBooks.com.

Read other reviews of The Last Way Home on Goodreads by clicking here.

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Sisters, by Danielle Steel, 2008, Bantam Dell (Random House)

Sisterly Love

This book is about sisters, their mom, and their dogs. Very, very special relationships. A strong love like no other. Supporting and rooting for each other above all else.

Sisters

As you can see, this particular paperback has been well-loved. It was given to me by my son. He walked 10 kilometers to one of those little free libraries to find it for me, so he was glad to see me happily reading it.

As with the four sisters in this novel, my own sister is the closest person to me, and our mother was very dear to us. As did these sisters, we aspire to honor our mother and the love she had for us and our family.

Though each of these four sisters is very different, their strong, sacrificial love for each other is compelling. They are there for one another through thick and thin. Especially throughout this year of crises that they go through in this story.

The sisters actively support one another through death, blindness, fame, boyfriends, false relationships, rape, romance and dogs.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, in case you wish to read it. I recommend it for you if you can relate to sisterly love, or any type of family love. In the mix of the story are themes of death, blindness, fame, boyfriends, false relationships, rape, romance, and dogs.

Although it deals with heavy topics, I found it a light read, and read the 400 pages within a week. LOL incidents are sprinkled in for flavor. A particularly amusing bit for me, was when one of the sisters, who in her mid thirties has given up hope of finding a good man, meets a born-again Christian. He’s been divorced four times and has seven children. The caps on his teeth are the size of chicklets and he has a woven-in hairpiece. He keeps asking her if she’s found Jesus, and she wonders where he went, thinking ‘Hasn’t he been here all along?’. Hehe. Other amusing scenes center around other character descriptions and incidents, especially to do with the dogs.

Thanks, Nathaniel. I look forward to reading the other books you found for me too. As the mother in the story loved her four daughters, I love you and your brother. As this mother said, that their sisters were the best gift she could give her daughters, the best gift I could give you and Paul was each other.

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Love Anthony, by Lisa Genova, 2012, Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster)

Free download

An offer of a free e-book from Simon & Schuster popped up on Facebook, and from the handful of choices I picked this one. Several years ago I read Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, which I really liked. So, I already had an appreciation of this author, but the blurb told me that Love Anthony was centred around an autistic child. I wasn’t so sure I was interested in reading about autism at this point in my life, as currently there are several other personal issues at the top of my list of concerns.

Qualified author

Lisa Genova is well qualified to write about brain disorders, as she holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard. Still Alice centres around dementia, and because her books are novels, they bring a more personal understanding of a particular disorder than a textbook does. She gets right into the heads and emotions of not only the person with the disorder, but also the family members and others in their lives.

It’s about so much more than autism.

So, between syrupy Hallmark movies and scaled down COVID-19 Christmas activities, I cozied down with a soft blanket in my lazyboy and started reading. The novel begins with two women who don’t know each other, but both live on Nantucket Island. I learned that Nantucket is in some ways similar to Vancouver Island, where I live. Dark drizzly gray winters that go on too long and bring on depression. But amazing sunny beach summers that bring boatloads of tourists with their hustle and bustle.

Needs in marriage

These two women have a few things in common. Both are newly separated from their husbands and facing up to that turmoil. Both had set aside their creativity and writing/editing interests for years while raising children.

Anthony’s story is woven in as his mother reflects on his short life and reads her diary. Then he tells some of his own story through the other woman, as she is inspired to write about an autistic child.

Understanding traits

The author cleverly gets across the point that autism is a wide, wide spectrum, and everyone has some of the traits. As I read I saw some of the traits in myself: the need to escape from noisy crowds, the preference for quiet preoccupation as opposed to human interaction. But the difference with Anthony is that such traits are extreme. He doesn’t speak at all or make eye contact. His life exists outside of social awareness.

Looking to God for answers

His mother questions her faith in God as part of processing her son’s autism. She prayed and prayed for answers, to no avail. She quit going to church a long time ago, but a priest tells her to keep trusting God and the answers will come to her.

As Anthony inspires the other woman to write his story, he speaks to her about love and acceptance, universal needs.

Simply ‘being’, in love, is the best thing in life.

I was very glad I read this book. It’s message will stay with me, helping me to understand love in a new way. The book is about so much more than autism or the lives of these two women.

Anthony’s mother, in retrospect, has the happiest memories of simple moments she spent with him, seemingly doing nothing, but oh so meaningful. Talking, doing, and accomplishing take a back seat after all, to simply being together. I totally relate; my most precious memories are of time spent with the people in my life in silence, enjoying the sunshine, the blue sky, ocean waves, fresh air, even cozied up in warm blankets looking out at a drizzly winter day.

Suggestions to the publisher

I would recommend this book to anyone. Unfortunately the title doesn’t give any clues to draw readers. I think I would change the book cover as well. After reading the book the title and cover make sense, but readers need something to draw them to the themes found inside. It’s like hiding your light under a bushel, as the Bible story goes.

Simon & Schuster offer a free download of the Glose app for reading. I found it very good. The only glitch was that a few pages here and there came up blank. I discovered that if you tap on the blank page the words appear.

https://glose.com/book/love-anthony

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