Falling Home. by Karen White. November 2010. NAL Accent Trade/New American Library/Penguin. 352 pp. ISBN #: 9780451231444.
Cassie has escaped a small town in Georgia she found absolutely stifling and has joined the world of a successful career and boyfriend in dynamic New York. But one phone call changes it all. Her father is dying and he wants to see her. Worst yet, she gets the message from her sister, who married the man Cassie once loved; and now they tell her she is needed. How can she return home and bear the pain of betrayed love and how will she respond to the town busybodies who feel they have the right to know the family’s entire story?
But Cassie’s life is about to be turned upside down. For as many gossips and busybodies she meets, she is surprised that an old friend, Sam, the town doctor, a man she didn’t even recognize as an old high school peer, takes an interest in her present circumstances. He’s not about to be insulted or literally take her rebuffs as she repeatedly reminds him and everyone else that she’s only back for a visit and her real life lies elsewhere.
Wounds hide the love we all hold deep down for a place called “Home,” a place with precious memories, a place that forms the fabric of who we become and will always be. What will the future hold for Cassie once those veneers of defensiveness and pain dissolve with a lot of patience and dedicated attempts to break down the walls of escape?
Falling Home is even better than On Folly Beach, the author's most recent novel, and that’s saying a lot!!! Get ready to curl up with this terrific novel and enjoy an unpredictable, engaging, and revealing story! Wonderful!
The Fun of Dying: Find Out What Really Happens Next by Roberta Grimes. 2010. Greater Reality Publications. Pb. 149 pp. ISBN #: 9780980211115.
The title of this book is bound to grab many readers. After all, who doesn’t wonder whether there is an afterlife; and if so, what is there, what is it like, etc., etc. Roberta Grimes has combed all the research out there to attempt to provide answers to every human being concerned with the life beyond the one in which we now live. Some of what she offers is common knowledge and other ideas are quite astounding!
The evidence covers science, religion, and other psychological phenomena that the author clearly indicates need not be opposed to each other but which actually consists of a continuum of experience that is impossible to contradict. It involves experience coupled with cutting edge knowledge, such as quantum physics, that is actually comforting, albeit challenging to those with rigid, dogmatic notions of the afterlife. Suspend disbelief while you read this book and take in the plethora of possibilities, such as the reality of energy that is not measurable as matter or time.
A considerable amount of space is given to the healing one needs after the death of the earthly body and how precise that is to each individual who passes over to the afterlife. Possible learning lessons, reincarnations, cravings satisfied, the necessity of forgiveness, the sense of awareness now being a part of our eventual passing, the role of religion in our passing and afterlife, and so much more fill these pages in a concise, clear and intriguing manner that keeps one’s interest through every single page. An appendix includes the author’s sources which the reader may seek to explore for greater detail about this common but unknown world – a process that is meant to be joyful and as normal as our current living.
The Fun of Dying… is a comprehensive, fearless guide to a world all will one day enter, as well as one which offers so much comfort, healing, and grace concerning our thoughts and feelings for those who have gone before us. Engaging and a complete account of what may become one’s own future!
