Theme Thursday -- Trees -- Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

Hosted by Reading Between the Pages

Rules:

*A theme will be posted each week on Thursday
*Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading that features the theme
*Post it and don't forget to mention the author and title of the book
*Event is open for the whole week
*Link back to Reading Between the Pages

This week's theme is trees.

When Daria was in her twenties and first arrived in Seattle, she had loved the edginess of it all, but it had been a while since she had come down at night and things had become darker somehow.  She pulled her coat a little closer and concentrated on the white Christmas lights hung among the branches of the trees lining the street.

~page 71, Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

Gosh, I really enjoyed this book. 

When Kate's friends gather to celebrate her recovery from cancer, they urge her to join her daughter on a white-water rafting trip.  Kate agrees, but says that in return each of her friends also have to do something that scares them or is out of the comfort zone -- and since Kate didn't get to pick hers, she gets to choose theirs.  Each chapter focuses on the experiences of one of the women as she attempts to complete her task. 

Bauermeister has created seven very different female characters with different joys and struggles -- and the things that are terribly difficult for one would be all in a day's work for another.  This is a book that would have been a very different read for me 10-15 years ago -- I don't think it would have affected me in the same ways or to the same depth.  But in this phase of my life, I just found Joy for Beginners to be absolutely beautiful.