First Lines Friday... A Musical Coming of Age Story Sprinkled with Mystery and Friendship

"Ever since she was born, Marijohn Shaw could hear the dark sing to her. 

It was an unusual truth, as darkness didn't have a voice. Yet she's always loved the inky pitch of things like nightfall and dreamless sleep--the mystery of it, the privacy, the music. Eighteen years ago, she'd slipped into the world with a swirl of dark hair and even darker thoughts. Her earliest memory wasn't sight but sound--a crooning in the dimness, low and certain, like the whisper of a beloved ghost she'd known forever."                 

                                                        ...Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns

This was the March Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club pick and I love the writing in just these first few lines. And I love the sound of the story too...

Young folk singer Elle Harlow reaches the height of her prowess in 1973, with two wildly beloved albums to her name and a hidden history of impossible heartbreak. When she sets foot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage, a far cry from the mountain that raised her, Elle gives the biggest performance of her life. Then, to the dismay of shocked fans, her producer, and the man who still loves her, she vanishes.

Almost two decades later, eighteen-year-old Marijohn Shaw is spending her summer pumping gas, writing songs on her broken mandolin, and longing for a mother. Her father, Abe, has always sworn he was the last person to see Elle Harlow alive, but when a meteor strikes the woods of their sleepy Pennsylvania town and a piece of Elle’s past emerges from the wreckage, the truth of her disappearance sets fire to everything Marijohn believes about herself, her music, and her ability to love with abandon.

Doesn't it sound like a delicious mystery... it is catergorized as "coming of age" and "small town fiction", but also has reviewers talking about the story of being about friendship, love and forgiveness. It certainly has piqued my interest!  Published by Celadon Books on March 3rd and on my wishlist now!

First Lines Friday...

All the dying that summer began with the deaht of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole, He was a sweet-looking kid and by that I mean he had eyes that seemed full of dreaming and he wore a half smile as if he was just about to understand something you'd spent an hour trying to explain.
                                     ... Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger


I was hearing a lot of buzz about This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger and saw that this was not his first book. In fact, William Kent Krueger has an award winning mystery series with #17 having been published in 2018. But Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land were not mysteries, but were literary fiction, coming-of-age novels. As I read the sample of Ordinary Grace I was struck by the easy going readability, the really good story writing and decided he was someone I needed to read. This Tender Land is on my TBR list, but Ordinary Grace is on my nightstand now. Published by Atria Books in 2014.

Memoir Monday...

Wild Game by Adrienne Arodeur... On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me. 

Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.  

Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.

As I was reading about new books, I kept gravitating to this book. I hadn't read a memoir is quite some time and honestly I wasn't really interested in all the celebrity tell alls that seemed to fill the shelves. But there was something about this one that caught my eye. And after reading the first half dozen pages or so I was hooked on Adrienne's writing, with the story unfolding as though it were literary fiction.

Since it's publication in October of this year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it has won "Best Book" accolades from Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post to name just a few. Not that I make my judgements of a book based on how many "Best" lists it's on, but it did make me a bit more curious. SO, this is now on my nightstand waiting for me to crack it open in 2020. This was going to be my first book of the year, but Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid won out after I was able to get a pre publication copy recently and read a half dozen or so pages of that and had to force myself to put it down. I have a feeling that this is going to be a great reading year!