The Sunday Salon: Lost and Found

Photo Credit: Jeff Mikels

This Sunday started out very fortuitously  - I found a necklace that has been missing for 2 weeks!  I had almost resigned myself to the fact that it was gone forever but I checked one last location this morning and there it was!  The necklace, besides being something I wear a few days a week, was a special gift and I was so disappointed that I had lost it.  I have a checkered past with valuable jewelry - over the years I have lost or broken many pieces.  But I have had a good run in the past few years and thought I had left my careless days behind - this experience has been a good reminder for me that I need to take better care. 

Books
At long last,  got some posts up this week - life had gotten the best of me over the past two weeks!  First, I reviewed the utterly charming Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt - if you are looking for an uplifting book with strong women characters, this is it!








Next, I reviewed The Odious Ogre, a children's book written by the duo responsible for The Phantom Tollbooth.  My nephew and I read this book and I was surprised by how much the story stayed with him - over the few days following our reading of it, he kept asking me about the story and sitting and paging through the book.  The illustrations are excellent and there is a lot to look at so it lends itself well to re-reads.  The vocab is also pretty advanced and he seemed to like learning all the new words.
 




Finally, I reviewed a book that just blew me away - Devotion by Dani Shapiro.  The memoir chronicles the author's search for grounding in faith and meaning.  It has been called a "literary excavation to the core of a life" which I think sums the book up well.  I was so impacted by the book that I want to giveaway a copy to two readers of my blog - stop by this post and comment for a chance to win.






Authors
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to see author Sarah Pekkanen  at a reading held at Soho House.  In addition to reading from her new book, Skipping a Beat , she discussed with her editor her experiences as a new author and shared some of her writing habits.  You can read about some of this on her website.  By all accounts, her latest book is great (you can read reviews here and here).  My copy is seriously tempting me to break the TBR DARE but so far, I have held out!

Author Pamela Schoenewaldt will be guest blogging here tomorrow!  Her novel When We Were Strangers  tells the story of Irma, a young girl that emigrates from a small village in Italy to the United States.  As part of my Immigrant Stories Challenge , Pamela will be writing here about immigration and her research for the book.  Please stop by!

Hope you all have a great Sunday!