TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
# Grab your current read.
# Let the book fall open to a random page.
# Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
# You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! # Please avoid spoilers!
My Two Teasers:
Vigil by Cecilia Samartin
But then, perhaps behind closed doors he wasn’t as I saw him. Perhaps I had invented a person who didn’t really exist and I had deluded myself into believing that he could rescue my dreams and correct all the wrongs I had endured.
When Frenchwoman Mireille Guiliano came to the US for a short stint as part of a student exchange program, she took back to France an additional and unwanted twenty pounds from the American way of eating. Once back in France, she put on more weight until her family stepped in. Loading her up with words of wisdom, tried and true advice and encouraging the French way of eating, Mireille lost the excess pounds. In this book, she shares with us her secrets.
Cecilia Ahern did a fantastic job with this book. Although at times the book dragged on, I really liked the concept and the new world she created in this novel. In the land of the missing, Sandy meets a number of people that she had been searching for her whole life and some point, starts to form closure with her past. There is a particular humor in Irish writing, one with I experienced earlier with The Lacemakers of Glenmara. Its a wry, ironic comedic timing, and Cecilia Ahern’s novel is full of it. Sandy Shortt is a no nonsense type of girl who tries to do her job, while fumbling through life. She has an intersting relationship with her former psychologist from high school that blossoms and dies whenever Sandy inevitably loses something, and it turns into an OCD episode trying to locate the thing. Ahern takes a good look at those that suffer losing a loved one with no answers as to why, or where they went. She tracks their obsession, sleepless nights, but even their eventual progression back into normal life and routine. It definitely makes a person wonder how they would handle having lost a loved one like that. Would you search endlessly? Or accept it as is and go back to normal life, or would you stay stagnant, always hoping and reliving life as if the missing person will show up any minute? The psychology in this book is fascinating, when you look at the handful of characters, from the missing people themselves, to their families reactions and experiences. Niether a sad book, nor a laugh out loud book, No Place Like Here is a great read.
Well, this book was all that, and so much more. I couldn’t put it down, I adored Heather Barbieri’s prose. She has an exquisite sense of comic timing mixed with sentimentality, that does not cross over into cheesiness. If you enjoyed any of Cecilia Ahern’s novels, then I think this would be a good one to add to your To Be Read list.
