LET’S CURL UP & TALK BOOKS: BOOK BEGINNINGS & THE FRIDAY 56 — JUST BREATHE — MAY 10

Welcome to some bookish fun today as we share Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and as we showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

If you have been wanting to participate, but haven’t yet tried, now is the time!

Today I’m featuring a book from Mt. TBR:  Just Breathe, by Susan Wiggs.

Beginning:  After a solid year of visits to the clinic, Sarah was starting to find the decor annoying.  Maybe the experts here believed earth tones had a soothing effect on anxious, aspiring parents.  Or perhaps that the cheery burble of a wall fountain might cause an infertile woman to spontaneously drop an egg like an overly productive laying hen.

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56:  Now that he was out of the picture, there was nothing standing between her and old memories, and she fell into the past like Alice down the rabbit hole, grasping at stray roots on her way to the bottom.

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Blurb:  Chicago cartoonist Sarah Moon tackles life’s real issues with a healthy dose of sharp wit in her syndicated comic strip Just Breathe. As Sarah’s cartoon alter ego, Shirl, undergoes artificial insemination, her situation begins to mirror Sarah’s own difficult attempts to conceive. However, Sarah’s dreams of the future did not include her husband’s infidelity: snag number two in Sarah’s so-called perfect life.

With Chicago and her marriage in the rearview mirror, she flees to the small Northern California coastal town where she grew up, a place she couldn’t wait to leave. Now she finds herself revisiting the past, an emotionally distant father and the unanswered questions left by her mother’s death. As she comes to terms with her lost marriage, Sarah encounters a man she never expected to meet again: Will Bonner, the high school heartthrob she’d skewered mercilessly in her old comics. Now a local firefighter, he’s been through some changes himself. But just as her heart is about to reawaken, Sarah discovers she is pregnant. With her ex’s twins.

It’s hardly the most traditional of new beginnings, but who says life and love are predictable or perfect? The winds of change have led Sarah here. Now all she can do is just close her eyes and breathe.

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I like the sound of these snippets….I wonder why it’s taken me so long to dive into this one?

What is on your list for today?  Come on by and let’s chat.