Patty Pick for 5/7/15 is Best Mom Award to My Mother

TRIBUTE TO MY MOM

My mother was quiet and loud at the same time. She was always ready to play 
games with us so we grew up knowing most every board game invented. She also taught us   
many card games which I passed on to my family. When my sister and I grew older and would beg off of playing games with her, she would play them with herself. 

She did make me work in our garden and eat my liver at dinner- yuck! But now I realize she was helping me grow up strong and learn the value of hard work. She was the consumate gardener. She had two very green thumbs which she did not pass along to me. Unfortunately I can kill a plant in record time. Plants realize this and they tremble when they enter our home. 

I wish I had more pictures of my mom, but the ones I do have show her laughing and joking. The ones with a serious face are rare. She is famous in our family for sticking her tongue out at the camera at the most inopportune moments. There are many such photos of our smiling family and there is mom making her funny faces. She did not like to have her picture taken any more than I do to this day. 

My mom was not a perfect person, but she was the perfect mom for our family. She held us together, feed us, taught us her life lessons, had fun with us and loved us to no end. I did not realize until after she was gone that she held our family together much more than we all knew. And she taught me what it means to be a mom - the joy, the fleeting timeline, the agony, but above all, the all-consuming love you have for your child(ren). 

My mom will be missed by us for the rest of our lives. She did not get to see her only son marry and have children. She did hold some of her other grandchildren and watched them grow up. She will not be there in person when my daughter marries and has her own children, but somehow I know she will be close. She is always close to me, just not close enough to save those poor plants I keep buying.   

Best Place to Read!

Such a nice warm day! The beaches in NC are definitely one of the best 

places to read! Loving this book all ready!

Patty Pick for 4/30/15 is "this dark road to mercy" by Wiley Cash

I could not wait to read another book by Wiley Cash after reading his, "A Land More Kind than Home". So when it was my turn to pick a book for my book club to read, I picked "This Dark Road to Mercy", his second novel. This novel centers around two sisters instead 
of two brothers and we change our locale to Gastonia, NC. What this one has in common with Wiley Cash's' first book is well written characters who are involved in personal and criminal tragedies.
We meet Easter and Ruth Quillby as they struggle through a hardscrabble life that includes finding their mother dead of a drug overdose in their house. The overly mature Easter takes her sister's hand and marches down to the corner convenience store to call 911. They are placed in foster care together and give a guardian by the court, Brady Weller, who has his own ghosts. 
Easter and Ruth are making friends, and trying to stay together in the system, when 
someone knocks on their window they do not expect - their father, Wade. Wade abandoned them when Ruth was young and their mother has forbidden his name to 
be mentioned. Wade had a promising baseball career that he threw away with a wild pitch and a recovery that never healed. He had made a choice that will effect all their 
lives. 
Easter is a mature, smart 12-year-old who knows how to figure out things on her own. She has been doing this and taking care of her younger sister for a long time. As the three run away together, they have a lot of people looking for them. This includes a criminal without an ounce of compassion named Robert Pruitt. He has a personal stake in finding Wade and it's not a good one. As our reluctant father works to start a relationship back with his daughters, they all run from Pruitt.  
As this thrilling southern novel runs toward the end, you want the girls to have a future in a safe environment, but does that include their father? 

Patty Pick for 4/23/15 is "Sweet Forgiveness" by Lori Nelson Spielman

Sweet Forgiveness is aptly titled, as the book has a broad forgiveness theme. I loved the main character, Hannah Farr. Down-to-earth person who is a local television star and talk show host which sounds like an oxymoron. Hannah is from the South however, and she is one of those strong but vulnerable women that our muggy, hot locales seem to grow best. She just has not figured that out completely yet. 

Hannah has it all, it seems, from a wildly, popular television show in New Orleans to a handsome boyfriend who happens to be the mayor of the city. She has a strong circle of supportive friends and she can even bake. But, and there always is one, she has been estranged from her mother since Hannah was a teenager. There is a dark family secret that only a few people know. She wants it to stay a secret.  

Then trouble arrives in a younger, calculating new anchor named Claudia who wants
Hannah's job. After being ambushed on a disastrous episode of her show, Hannah decides to find her mother and to try to get the facts and forgive her for everything that happened after her parents split up. It's a long way to Michigan from Louisiana and Hannah does some soul-searching along the way. This sweet book teaches us all there is more than one side to the story and time can give us perspective and forgiveness. This book is expected to be published in June 2015 - just in time for some great vacation reading!         

Patty Pick for 4/16/15 is "The Hypnotist's Love Story" by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty knows how to tell a story. As our hypnotherapist, Ellen O'Farrell, sits at 

the dinner table with her new love interest, Patrick, she finds out he has a secret to share. Patrick is being stalked by his last girlfriend, Saskia, and she has shown up at their restaurant. She show up everywhere actually. Saskia can not let Patrick or his son, Jack, alone. She follows them by foot and by car. Ellen doesn't know it but Saskia is one of her patients. Saskia sneaks into the house of our too-trusting Ellen under another name just to check out Patrick's new girlfriend.

As Ellen's and Patrick's relationship deepens, Saskia's desperation to separate them goes into overdrive. She becomes more and more unhinged as their relationship becomes an

engagement. Ellen must overcome her own doubts that Patrick is really going to be around and has gotten over his feelings for Saskia. Even after he takes her to meet his parents and proposes, she doubts his feelings. 

All of these people come together with more secrets and lies one fateful night to a climax that will make them face all their needed decisions. You can count on Liane Moriarty to pull the strings and tidy it up before the end of the book, one of my favorite traits in authors. Liane Moriarty always tells a good story with some of my favorite fictional characters. Don't miss "The Husband's Secret" or "Big, Little Lies" by her also!

Patty Pick for 4/9/15 is "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

"The Secret History" by Donna Tartt was an interesting book. It kept my attention most of the time, but it is one of those books that you end up with a strong dislike for all of the characters. Maybe I'm a spoiled reader, in that, I like to pull for or plot against a character(s) in my books. That whole "good versus bad" theme resonates with me. 

In this book, they are all bad. I know we are supposed to feel sorry for the narrator, Richard, because he is misunderstood and poor but he makes his own choices. 

Richard goes off to a snotty college with rich kids that party, do drugs and sundry other normal college kids activities. What makes his group a little different is they manage to kill two people in the process. You are going to be reading frantically to find out if they will get caught in either case. 

This book has a strange beginning, middle and end, even though it was highly rated and touted. I think this novel is just so removed from my current life that I could not get into the storyline as much as some books. It is very well written with rich descriptions of the characters and their Greek-obsessed lives. Not my favorite book, but still looking forward to reading "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt in the future.  

Happy Easter!

Hope you all are having a wonderful Easter with your family & friends. See you Thursday with a review of "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt!