Theme Thursday -- Location -- Moonglass by Jessi Kirby

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 location(where the story is set).

The beach and its cottages stood out in stark contrast to the other side of the Pacific Coast Highway.  Across four lanes, lining the hills, was a series of homes that were really more like the celebrity compounds I'd seen in magazines.  The higher up the hill they were, the taller the columns and the wider the arches got, like each house was in competition with the next.  It was ridiculous.  And sort of intimidating, if I was being honest with myself.


~p13, Moonglass by Jessi Kirby


I enjoyed this young adult novel about Anna, whose mother killed herself ten years prior to the novel's beginning.  When Anna's dad takes a transfer to the exact beach where he met her mom, Anna has to decide how much she wants to know more about her mother's life and death.  I definitely cried the last 30 pages or so.  This is a great first novel from Kirby.

Letting go of preconceptions -- ours and those of others

. . . when we are trying to figure out what we want to be when we grow up it is dangerous to bring preconceptions of ourselves -- fears, biases, or negative ideas about ourselves -- into the process.  When we allow ourselves to succumb to fears, biases, & self-criticism, we paralyze ourselves. We are unable to see new possibilities, and therefore to make positive changes in our lives . . . to become a life change artist, we need to see how others see us, and make a decision about whether others' views of us are consistent with how we see ourselves, or how we would like to see ourselves.

~page 110-111, Becoming a Life Change Artist:  Seven Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life by Fred Mandell, Ph.D., & Kathleen Jordan, Ph.D.

Quote of the day

Imagining a future life creates the brain pathways that make it easier for you to actually make the changes you have imagined.

~page 106, Becoming a Life Change Artist by Fred Mandell & Kathleen Jordan 

My friend Tamie sent me a key chain from Ireland earlier this month.  I haven't had one for quite a while.  This instant, there are two keys on it -- one is for my friend Jen's house, where my seven-year-old and I have been living since the 12th of June and the other is to the store I work at -- a new job I started on July 1st.  Very soon, though, the key chain will also hold a key to a brand-new apartment for Fiona and I.  I didn't expect that having a key chain with my own keys on it would be so empowering, but it is -- I have my own keys to my own life - it's makes it easier to imagine the rest of the picture, of having power and security and goodness in my life.  This is a good thing.