Teaser Tuesdays -- November 16, 2010 --

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers! 

Which is sharper?  The hatchet that cuts down dreams?  Or the scythe that clears a path for another?  

~ from The Dreamer  by Pam Munoz Ryan & Peter Sis

Reading this one with my six-year-old daughter right now.  The main character's father is pretty harsh, so I'm finding myself doing tiny bits of editing from time to time, but am also finding a lot of beauty in the book.  This quote felt very hopeful to me, which is something I welcome these days.

The privacy or obscurity on Negro life makes that life capable, in our imaginations, of producing anything at all; and thus the idea of Bigger's monstrosity can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice. It is an idea, which, in the framework of the novel, is dignified by the possibility it promptly affords of presenting Bigger as the herald of disaster, the danger signal of a more bitter time to come when not Bigger alone but all his kindred will rise, in the name of the many thousands who have perished in fire and flood and by rope and torture, to demand their rightful vengeance.
~p. 41-2, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

A friend of mine read this book recently and so I picked it up as well.  Though I noticed, in the process of writing this post, that she only gave it 7/10 stars.  I might not have picked it up if I'd paid attention to that, though I have a vague notion that it is a book that one "should" read.

Cover of Healing the Hurt, Restoring the Hope

Grieving a serious loss like death or divorce takes years to complete.  Oddly, the first year is usually the easiest.  

~p. 33, Healing the Hurt, Restoring the Hope:  How to Guide Children and Teens through Times of Divorce, Death, and Crisis with the RAINBOWS Approach by Suzy Yehl Marta


I have this one out from the library right now and have been appreciating it as a way to continue thinking about how to talk with my daughter about my pending divorce, how to think about it myself, and what to expect from both of us.  I definitely think that, as the subtitle implies, this book would be relevant to other types of loss as well.  This quote specifically strikes me as an important thing to remember.