So I thought I'd update you on my most recent reads. Little Women was our book club book this month. For some reason I had put this book off for years. Even though I really like classic literature, I couldn't get past the first few chapters just because I felt like it was too hokey. I thought they all love each other and they all love their mom and blah. I decided to push through it for book club though. I LOVED THIS BOOK! I became passionate about it actually. I decided that, as a mother, I have to believe that family love that strong is possible. I feel like todays media will portray families as always fighting and selfish, that the parents are typically wrong, and that for some things you just can't ever forgive. It's not true. This book helped re-affirm what my experience has proven to be true: that families are strongest when they stick together, that parents often have wise counsel learned from experience, and that religion helps strengthen individuals and families.
The Memory Keepers Daughter I got from a friend at church. I don't read much modern adult fiction. It was a change for me. It was good in that in was .... clean. It was just like the opposite of little women. It's a story about a couple who had a baby with downs syndrome that the dad secretly gave away. It creates like a wedge in their family. I think it felt a little darker to me just because I read it after Little Women so I was thinking about the great potential of families but this was about a family making a lot of bad decisions. I think at a different time I probably wouldn't have felt it as strong.