Tag: honesty

A Book Review: Whistling Past the Graveyard

Lauren1 Comment

Book Group was weird this week.  I’m still trying to get the hang of this “Go Somewhere By Myself And Try Not To Be Shy” thing but I feel like I have to give myself a Hannah-From-GIRLS style pep talk beforehand (come on, you know the one).  At this particular meeting, there were about 12 of us and maybe it was because I wasn’t that into the book and didn’t speak up much but I just felt uninteresting and like I wasn’t really fitting in with the group.  I don’t know where I get this need to be liked by others from but I should probably work on that.  Just keeping it real today.

Anyway, back to the book, Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall.

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I thought it was just okay.  The plot, characters and writing-style didn’t particularly excite me.  The narrator is a 9-year-old girl (Starla), who runs away from home, befriends a black woman (Eula) who has just found a white baby abandoned on the steps of a church and decided to keep him as her own and the three of them journey to Nashville to find Starla’s mother.

I could appreciate that the author decided to use a child narrator because it allowed her to delve into race relations in the 1960’s with a certain level of innocence and naivety, but I felt like she only brushed the surface of the intensity of things that happened during the Civil Rights Movement.  It was all a little too simple, especially to have taken place in the deep south.

That being said, some of the characters were very endearing and you couldn’t help but like them.  The relationship between Starla and Eula was particularly sweet.  Some of my favorite parts of the book were centered around them baking and bonding together and really transcending any race barriers.  Go figure that I’d like the parts that included pie 🙂  Overall, it just reminded me too much of The Help and how much more I liked that book over this one.

What are you reading right now?

On Letting Go

Lauren1 Comment

Sometimes I get in these ruts of overthinking things and maybe caring too much about stuff.  I blame my incessant need to have the future overly planned out (hello, control issues!), but at times it gets to be more than I can handle.  Ahem, an example.

This weekend we’ve got Rockies game, Avs game, Easter baking, Easter celebrating, make up and hair trials for the wedding, then come the work week, it’s two more birthday celebrations and another Rockies game.  Whoa!  Already, my brain is like “when will I have time to work out?” “when will I have time to cook so that we have stuff to bring to work for lunch?” “when will I fit in that 4 mile run I promised I’d go on in an attempt to be ready for the Bolder Boulder next month?” “and when will I even have time to go to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for the dessert I volunteered to make for Easter?!”

And I could spend a bunch of time incessantly planning out how to fit all of those things into the next few days, but… I just don’t want to.  It’s exhausting and a waste of what time I do have.  So what if I go 5 days without working out or GASP! have to buy lunch on the fly because I didn’t have time to put together a perfectly balanced meal at home.  I will live and life will go on.  Plus all those worrisome thoughts are just taking up space in my head that should only be filled with the idea of how much fun the next few days are going to be!  And sometimes, feeling out of control can be pretty freeing.

Life is about to get all kinds of busy.  Birthdays, wedding showers, bachelorette parties, actual weddings and vacations are all coming up fast and while my first instinct might be to go into a tailspin of anxiety, instead I’m going to remind myself that that’s a lot of incredibly exciting things to be busy with.  And that I might just have to give up some control in order to fully enjoy it all.

Happy Thursday, you all!