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Day Thirteen & A Book Review: Everywhere Holy

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Today I am reviewing Everywhere Holy by Kara Lawler. Thank you to TLC Book Tours and Thomas Nelson for a copy of the book.

About the Book (from the Publisher):

Popular writer and blogger Kara Lawler shows women how to embrace the sacred in mundane, ordinary life – and in the process, discover themselves.

Life doesn’t have to be lived on grand mountaintops for it to be meaningful. We can see God at work right where we are: in our ordinary and mundane routines, in the faces of our family and friends, and–especially–in nature.

Kara Lawler speaks to the hearts of those who find themselves lost in the midst of their chaotic schedules and weary attempts to be all that is expected of them. Everywhere Holy addresses our deepest struggles, including:

  • How to feel joy, despite depression and anxiety
  • Dealing with hardships and understanding unconditional love
  • How to view life as an adventure, even when that feels too hard
  • How to feel more connected, more grateful, and more at peace

In beautiful prose, Lawler describes the unique sacredness found in God’s creation and offers 15 inspiring insights for cultivating it day-to-day. She encourages you to make this lifestyle change through the observance of small acts. In so doing, you will discover a holy space that honors God and the life you’ve been given–and will discover yourself and your unique place in the holy that is everywhere, whether it’s in the woods behind your house or in the face of a stranger on a bus in a busy city. No matter where you are, there is holy free for the taking.

My review: I have, throughout the course of my 12 years of blogging, resisted writing anything that might be considered ‘religious.’ Spiritual? Yes, occasionally. But my resistance stems from my upbringing, where I was taught that religious beliefs were intensely personal and private and that one did not preach to others, but respected their beliefs or non-beliefs. That is why I do not read blogs that are what I would consider ‘preachy.’

That being said, I am intensely spiritual and my beliefs have changed and grown over the years and one of the things I am absolutely sure of is the presence of God (or a Higher Power, Divine Intelligence, the Creator, Buddah, Allah, whatever word you use) in the world around me; in nature, animals, people. Kara Lawler writes about this very thing.

Her essays, drawn from her own life, are lovely explorations and realizations of God everywhere. She is a young mother, therefore her writing will really resonate with women of a certain age. But the truths realized should resonate with anyone who has sought peace, looked for a sense of guidance, a sense of the wonder of life in a bird or a beautiful rock or in the smile of a child.

Kara writes beautifully. This is the sort of book that can be opened at any chapter, though there is a progression in the storytelling, for some sustenance in the course of a day. She lives in the country with her husband and two young children, a host of pets, and the Allegheny Mountains as a backdrop. She has struggled, as we all do, to find her identity. In the course of her journey, she discovers holiness everywhere and finds who she really is.

If this is the kind of book you are drawn to, I think you’ll like it very much indeed.

About the author:

From Kara: Through my writing, I hope to help people see beauty, remember their own identities, and find God, right where they are. It seems hard, really, in the shuffle that makes up this beautiful (but not always easy) life. How can we even focus on beauty or God, with full lives and the current state of the world? Quite honestly, that’s a struggle that has left me out of breath and on my knees. But, by doing this–by noticing beauty and looking for God all around–, I believe we really can discover who we are and who God meant for us to be. I try to see the beauty in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the holy in the everyday, and as St. Ignatius said, “God in all things.” Join me on this pursuit of holiness amidst the chaos of an everyday.

Kara Lawler lives in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania with her husband, Mike, and their children, Matt and Maggie. Kara holds a BA in English and a MA in education and has been teaching high school English for close to two decades. She is the co-author of A Letter for Every Mother and has been published on various sites to include Today Parents and Huffington Post. Find Kara on www.karalawler.com and on Facebook to follow to join her journey of identity, faith, friendship, marriage, and motherhood.

Good news! One of you will win a copy of this book. If you are interested, leave a comment on this blog post. (It has to be here, not via email.) I’ll pick a winner on Saturday evening. (U.S. readers only.)

Happy Thursday.

Book Review: Body Leaping Backward by Maureen Stanton

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Today I am reviewing Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood  by Maureen Stanton for TLC Book Tours. Thank you to TLC Book Tours and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advanced copy of the book. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

About the book (from the publisher): For Maureen Stanton’s proper Catholic mother, the town’s maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line (“If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in Walpole Prison!”).  But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton’s once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. No longer scared by threats of Walpole Prison, Stanton too slips into delinquency—vandalism, breaking and entering—all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon’s “total war” on drugs.

Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.

My review: This book is riveting. Stanton’s unsparing examination of her girlhood, of the community in which she grew up, and of the choices she made makes for a compelling read.

For Stanton, the impact of her parents’ divorce reverberated throughout her teenage years. Her mother, trying to take care of 7 kids, drifted into shoplifting. Into larceny. At some point, Stanton, dropped out – not of school – out of caring. She hung around fellow drug users. She drank. She took crazy risks. Once an athlete and a very bright student, she skipped class more often than not, and when she was in attendance, was apathetic. She was on a downward spiral, breathtaking in its speed.

I didn’t do drugs when I was a kid, so learning about their impact on the town of Walpole in the seventies was an education in itself. They were everywhere. PCP or angel dust was Stanton’s drug of choice and large numbers of young people were ‘dusting.’ PCP, a drug that ‘incapacitated thought and speech; your brain no longer functioned, and sometimes you couldn’t form basic words” ends up erasing Stanton’s sense of self. It’s a dissociative anesthetic. That she survived is a miracle. That she found a reason to stop using drugs, to change her life and move forward is another miracle.

One of the things I loved about this book was Stanton’s exploration not just of her downward spiral but of Walpole Prison and the effect it had on the town, her attention to the statistics as to incarceration and recidivism, as well as the drug culture of the 1970s.. Along the way, while telling her story, Stanton tells a bigger story; that of a town and a prison and a climate where drugs were allowed to proliferate, where so many people slipped through the cracks either to drugs or crime or both. She honestly speaks of her parents and her siblings and a family that struggled mightily but somehow managed to keep loving each other and still do.

The story Stanton shares is one of ultimate triumph, but the path to that triumph is harrowing. I applaud her willingness to look at her young life and her actions. Distance gives us a chance to see the bigger picture.

She seems to have compassion for that younger Maureen. She should.

The book is beautifully written. I recommend it highly.

About the author: Maureen Stanton is an award-winning nonfiction writer, and author of “Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood,” a People Magazine “Best New Books” pick, and “Killer Stuff and Tons of Money,” winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays and memoirs have been published in many literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Florida Review, New England Review, and River Teeth, among others. She has received the Iowa Review Prize, the American Literary Review Prize, Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowships. She has an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

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Good news! I can give away one copy of this book to one of you. (Confined to readers in the United States.) Leave a comment on this post – not in an email – and I will draw a winner on Saturday evening. Good luck!

Happy Wednesday.

Book Review: The Eighth Sister by Robert Dugoni

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Today I am reviewing The Eighth Sister by Robert Dugoni for TLC Book Tours. Thank you to TLC and to Thomas & Mercer for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book.

About the book (from the publisher): Former CIA case officer Charles Jenkins is a man at a crossroads: in his early sixties, a new baby on the way, and a security consulting business on the brink of bankruptcy. Then his former bureau chief shows up at his house with a risky new assignment: travel undercover to Moscow and locate a Russian agent believed to be killing members of a clandestine US spy cell known as the seven sisters.

Desperate for money, Jenkins agrees to the mission and heads to the Russian capital. But when he finds the mastermind agent behind the assassinations – the so-called eighth sister – she is not who or what she is led to believe. Then again, neither is anyone else is this deadly game of cat and mouse.

Pursued by a dogged Russian intelligence officer, Jenkins executes a daring escape across the Black Sea, only to find himself abandoned by the agency he serves. With his family and freedom at risk, Jenkins is in the fight of his life – against his own country.

My review: In the spirit of full transparency, I’ve long been a fan of Robert Dugoni’s books. I have reviewed a few of the books in his Tracy Crosswhite Series on this blog; Tracy being a police detective in the Pacific Northwest. Like his other books, this book starts and ends in that same area of the country, where Charles Jenkins lives with his wife and young son.

But the locale quickly changes to Moscow, the Black Sea and other parts of the world, as Jenkins goes on his secret mission for the CIA. Dugoni clearly knows Moscow and his descriptions of that part of the world are evocative. Time and place are beautifully written in all of Dugoni’s books, so the reader feels immersed in the temperature of the air, the surrounding landscape, biting winds, the cold sea water. We are not only caught up in the story, we’re caught up in place. As it should be.

This is a new direction for Dugoni, who has at least three series going: Tracy Crosswhite, David Sloan, and now, Charles Jenkins. I haven’t read any of the David Sloane Series – he’s a lawyer – but he plays a big role in this story as Jenkins’ close friend and lawyer.

Dugoni is a great storyteller. This story has many layers, many twists and turns, and to Dugoni’s credit, I couldn’t put it down. The plot is a complicated one, yet Dugoni deftly guides the reader through it while the suspense builds to a crescendo.

I’ve read a lot of spy thrillers and they can feel a little cold and distant. I’m not sure why – is it the nature of the spy who must do his job no matter what? Who must live a life where he is undercover, precluding any sort of emotional attachments? I suspect so. However, with this book, Dugoni has created a reluctant  spy who has strong emotional attachments to his family and friends, who has a strong sense of morality, and who, despite his reluctance, commits to the mission with honor. He’s fascinating.

A thoroughly riveting and enjoyable read.

I think you’ll like this book. I know I did.

About the author: Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite Series, which has sold more than 3.5 million books worldwide. He is also the author of the bestselling David Sloane Series; the stand-alone novels The 7th Canon, Damage Control, and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, for which he won an AudioFile Earphones Award for the narration; and the nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary, a Washington Post  Best Book of the Year. He is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction and the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set the the Pacific Northwest. He is a two-time finalist for the International Thriller Award, the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Silver Falchion Award for mystery, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. His books are sold in more the twenty-five countries and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.

Good news! I am giving away a copy of The Eighth Sister! (USA and Canada) Just leave a comment on this post (not on the email version of this post) to be considered. On Sunday evening, using the Random Number Generator, I will pick a winner. Good luck!

Happy Thursday.

Lambs Like to Party

Lambs Like to Party

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