If It's a BOOK, Let's Have It

  Best Book of the summer.  Bonnie Rawson recommended this book to me.  It was available while I as waiting for other books, so even tho it didn't sound too interesting, I read it. And, I LOVED it.  Maybe it's because my neighbor, Fred Calder, used to keep bees.  Maybe it's because I have always found bees fascinating, but knew little about them.  And, this book teaches A LOT about them and the art of beekeeping. But, it's more than that.  It's a story about a young girl whose parents get divorced.  She and her brother move with their mother from Vermont to California to live with her grandparents.   There begins a very difficult life for Meredith over the next 12 years or so.  Her mother stays in her bedroom day after day as the divorce totally sent her into a deep depression.  Plus, I'm sure she has some very deep emotional trauma because her own father beat her - OFTEN as a child growing up.  The mother is totally incapable ...

 I have no idea where I heard about this book or if a friend recommended it. It's a disaster of a book.  I felt rotten and disgusted after I finished reading it.  No, it's not explicit or sexual.  BUT, until the end of the book (the last three chapters or so, the reader has NO IDEA that 3 of the four main characters were all murderers.) Billed as a psychological murder, I was just happily going along wondering who murdered the psychiatrist and what happened to her body.  At the end, I was disgusted and I felt tricked and deceived. The story opens as a young couple, married for six months, are looking to buy a home.  They get stuck out in the woods, with no cell service, and are forced to spend a couple of nights in the creepy home where a psychiatrist lived and who disappeared but was never found.  They seem like a normal couple and they seem to love each other. As the story progresses, some of their character flaws emerge, but it is not until at the f...

 Recommended by Bonnie Rawson.  This is the story of two sisters who have not spoken since their parents' funeral ten years ago.  The parents were killed by a drunk driver who was Olivia's best friend thru out high school.  After the accident, Olivia's sister reaches out to Josh to say she has forgiven him, and this infuriates Olivia.  So, this back packing trip along the shores of Lake Michigan is supposed to help them talk things out and heal the wounds.  Little does Olivia suspect that Josh has actually asked Melanie to marry him.  The trip could not have been more disastrous; floods, a bear in the camp, falling in the river, arguments, and more.  A very mysterious man appears and helps them win their most dire and trying circumstances (a reference to Christ.)  I give it about 3 stars.  It's so painful to read about fractured families.  Oh, how I pray that never happens in our family.