A book written in question and answer format with illustrations for young readers between a girl and a friend who asks her questions about living with two fathers.
The book was well-written and very nicely illustrated.
A Tale of Two Daddies is a nice way to show how similar a non-traditional family is to a more traditional one.
Good book for young readers who may have questions.
A young boy on a beach outing with his two moms answers questions from other kids about who does what at home.
It is a nicely written and illustrated children's book that gives and easily understood look into a non-traditional family.
Good starting point for children who might have questions about why a friend or classmate has two mothers and how similar that family is to a more traditional one.
Please welcome Sara Lunsford to Lily's Reviews on this stop in her blog tour:
Marriage and the Job
And I know what that’s like because I was one too. We worked at the same prison.
I speak a lot about my husband and what life was like then in my memoir Sweet Hell on Fire, but I haven’t spoken about what it’s like to be married to him now—since he still does the Job and I don’t. It was a special kind of hell to be at a post where I couldn’t respond to an emergency alarm in the cell house my husband was working, but at least there I felt like I had some control. Being at home and out of the loop is another flavor of fear altogether.
Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. Since I’m a writer, my fevered imagination can come up with more horrible scenarios than what’s actually possible in any given situation. Except this one. The things that happen behind the walls could rival any horror story with the sheer depravity of what human beings are capable of inflicting on each other.
Even though this knowledge sometimes feels like a burden, it’s worth it because it helps me to be a better wife. I can truly be his haven and his best friend because I understand what he’s dealing with and the pressure he’s under.
In the book, one of the first things I discuss is how they teach us that we have to be two different people. The person we are behind the walls and the person we show to the rest of the world, shrugging the other off like a cloak as we walk through the gates. But it’s not that simple.
How strong can a relationship be if there are some things that you just can’t share with each other? I think that’s a big reason why there’s such a high rate of substance abuse and divorce among law enforcement. The Job creeps into that separate life, spilling like an ink stain over everything we touch. Instead of trying to hold back the tide, my husband and I have chosen to embrace it, to work with the flow instead of against it. He can tell me anything.
Before he goes to work, I make sure I kiss him and tell him how much I love him because there’s always the chance that he might not come back out through those gates. Yet, still I say I got my Happily Ever After because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed to anyone no matter what career path they’ve chosen.
Book Blurb: The night before his wedding, Zander Walsh, his parents, and his husband-to-be are all shot when they return home and interrupt a mysterious robbery in progress. After three weeks in a coma, Zander wakes up to find out he is the only survivor, and his perfect life falls apart in an instant.
Hunky FBI Agent Jake Elliot is investigating the case, and he eventually apprehends the killer—who soon escapes. Following six months of searching, Zander and Jake realize they’re being stonewalled by the FBI... and that they have slowly formed an unbreakable bond that is beginning to turn into much more.
Once they embark on a journey to apprehend the killer for the second time, they’ll discover that one terrible night was much more than just an interrupted robbery. Can big business and politics cover up the truth, or will Zander and Jake’s quest to unravel the mystery be the end of their newfound love and their lives?
Review: Even though I had picked up Bounty of Love before Foundation of Love from Netgalley, I wound up reading the former after the latter.
While I had enjoyed reading Foundation, I found Bounty to be more enjoyable. Part of it stems that, for me, the dialogue had more of a flow and felt less stilted. Another part is the characters. The loss that Zander Walsh suffered is offset by slowly working his way back from his grief. Jake Elliot has his career path set in the FBI, but when things start looking "fishy" for him on the case, he starts looking and the two work together. Which leads to things developing on a personal level. There is also the mystery of why what happened, happened.
I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how the story unfolded, how the characters grew and how their relationship developed.
Image and Book Blurb (C) Dreamspinner Press, LLC
I enjoy cooking and Cooking from the Farmers' Market provides many wonderful recipes with a broad range of fruit and vegetables from the farmers' market. What I liked about the book is that there is a good balance between dishes that involve different kinds of meat, salads, and fruit. While I wouldn't say that the non-meat dishes are fully vegetarian (based on what I know of that type of cooking), they can easily be used in vegetarian cooking. I also liked that the measurements were in both English and metric units as well as having "hints" as to what to look for when buying different fruit and vegetables and some basic recipes (such as Basil Oil) at the back of the book.
Recipes tried: Cannellini Bean Soup with Ham and Pasta, Bulgur Pilaf with Pumpkin and Raisins, and Cucumber Salad with Yogurt-Dill Sauce. The soup has a great blend of flavors and is very hearty. Perfect for a cold evening or a rainy day.
The Pilaf and Cucumber Salad were done as side dishes for pork chops. The Pilaf would also be great, upon tasting it and having a feel for the flavors, as a filling for stuffed pork chops or as a side dish or stuffing for poultry. Great dish.
The Cucumber Salad was good with a dressing that is lighter to the taste than a more traditional (based on my experience with this type of salad) one. The ingredients for this dressing involves yogurt, fresh lemon juice, garlic, fresh dill, salt, white pepper, and extra virgin olive oil as opposed to the sour cream, dill, vinegar, salt and pepper I am more familiar with. While I and my family liked this salad, we found that we prefer the other version by a very narrow margin.
As part of a virtual blog tour, Lily's Reviews welcomes David Ebenbach with a guest post.
Failure
David Ebenbach
My new book, Into the Wilderness, was born out of a failure. In 2006, a new father, I started writing a novel about a new single mother. I was interested in exploring the really massive experience of parenthood, which was bigger than I ever could have imagined. Well, after a couple of years I finished the book, and started sending it around to agents. The responses started to come in pretty quickly; unfortunately, they were all rejections.
One agent was nice enough, however, to include a personal note, and what she said really clarified things for me. The agent wasn’t able to sympathize with the narrator at all, because the character’s reaction to parenthood was so extreme. Well, that was true. Because it was a novel, I’d felt the need to add lots of drama to keep the reader interested. This mother was so overwhelmed that she was going out, night after night, leaving the baby entirely alone in the apartment. Now, I’ve known some parents who have had guilty thoughts about doing that kind of thing, but I don’t know anyone who’s actually done it. So I had taken something real and blown it out of proportion, distorted it completely, in order to turn it into a novel.
At that point I backed away from the novel and spent some time writing short stories, my first love in fiction. After a while I found I had accumulated a good handful of new stories, and all of them were about parenthood. Interesting. I also took another look at the novel and saw that there were sections without all that extra melodrama, sections that might be able to stand alone as stories. I pulled those parts out and messed with them until I felt they worked. And suddenly there it was: enough material for a book. I still had to arrange the stories, but I was undoubtedly on my way to writing a book of fiction about parenthood. Not a novel, but something else—something truer to who I am as a writer.
I didn’t need melodrama. I just needed to show—like a good short story always shows—that little things are actually a big deal. You can talk about parenthood, for example, the way it really unfolds—the mundane sleep deprivation, all the regular and miraculous development and growth of the baby, the unexpected changes in friendships and marital relationships—and show people how much quiet drama there is to be found there. That’s plenty. My novel—my failed novel—taught me that. And here’s the other thing I learned: writers shouldn’t be afraid of failure. When I hold my new book, Into the Wilderness, in my hands, it’s all very clear to me that failure is just an early part of success.
Into the Wilderness: “For the very real people in David Ebenbach’s vivid and emotional stories,” says author Jesse Lee Kercheval, “becoming a parent—as Judith, the single mother in four of the stories, says—is going ‘into the wilderness.’” The collection Into the Wilderness explores the theme of parenthood from many angles: an eager-to-connect divorced father takes his kids to a Jewish-themed baseball game; a lesbian couple tries to decide whether their toddler son needs a man in his life; one young couple debates the idea of parenthood while another struggles with infertility; a reserved father uses an all-you-can-eat buffet to comfort his heartbroken son. But the backbone of the collection is Judith, who we follow through her challenging first weeks of motherhood, culminating in an intense and redemptive baby-naming ceremony. Says author Joan Leegant, “Ebenbach takes us deep into the heart of the messy confusion and terror and unfathomable love that make up that shaky state we call parenthood. These stories are fearless, honest and true.”
David Ebenbach was born and raised in the great city of Philadelphia, home of America’s first library, first art museum, first public school, and first zoo, along with his very first stories and poems – though those early efforts went on to become (deservedly) less famous than, for example, the zoo.
Since then David has lived in Ohio, Wisconsin, Philadelphia again, New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Ohio again, picking up some education (formal and otherwise) and more than a few stories along the way. He has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
In addition to his short-story collection Into the Wilderness (October 2012, Washington Writers’ Publishing House), David is the author of another book of short stories entitled Between Camelots (October 2005, University of Pittsburgh Press), and a non-fiction guide to creativity called The Artist’s Torah (forthcoming, Cascade Books). His poetry has appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Subtropics, and the Hayden's Ferry Review, among other places.
He has been awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center; and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.
David currently teaches at Georgetown University and very happily lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and son, both of whom are a marvel and an inspiration.
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