Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to discover books you'll love! tweet #IMWAYRBe sure to check out my 2nd post today with a terrific giveaway!
for adults
I read this for my book group. It is a favorite of one of the group, and she insisted that all of us had to read it. I'm so glad she did. It is a book about life, about cooking (with recipes!), a memoir of a time that in her twenties, a brain aneurysm almost killed her. She didn't die, and that isn't giving anything away, but she learned to live a different way because of her illness. I imagine we can all learn from her and imagine that many of you will love her story. In the midst of recovery, here is one part of the learning she shared, about a phrase we have all heard, perhaps lived by: "'What would you do if you could do anything?' wasn't it at all. Instead, I should have been asking myself something else all along: 'What would you do if you could do nothing?' That, for me, for a lot of us, I imagine, was the real question." And finally, there is more to the title "Stir" than cooking. Look for it!
for young adults
Thanks to NetGalley for the arc. It's a chance auto breakdown that keeps high school valedictorian Lance from a weekend with friends and without parents. He's been waiting for this time with girlfriend Miriam for a long time. It's days before graduation, Lance has a full scholarship to Oregon State University to study Business, but he still auditioned for a music school in Seattle. If he dumps his car, Lance can return home in time to party with his girlfriend, but the old Buick is all Lance has left from his dad who left a while ago. It's teenage growing up, thrown into a strange rural area of drinkers at the only local bar in town, and from which he gets this new nickname, "Wildman". There was lots of drinking, lots of crazy in the bar and in a wooded area as well as in the odd places the car ended up being repaired. Yes, there was more than one. It ends up the way you might guess, Lance takes that "other" path, keeps the car, rejects his girl for another. He's become someone new, and so far, someone he likes. I suspect more than one teen about to leap away into life from high school will like this.
