Teaser Tuesdays (January 20)

Should Be Reading hosts the Teaser Tuesdays weekly event.

My modified rules are as follows:

Grab your current read. Pick two or three “teaser” sentences more or less at random from the book, anywhere on the page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your teaser from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! (Please avoid spoilers!) (Read the official Teaser Tuesday rules.)

I’m between books right now (still reading The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, but I like spacing these essays out with something else), so I thought I’d provide teasers from the two books I’m considering reading next. These are the opening lines from each of these books.

My first teaser:

“My dad died at an incredibly inconvenient time, and I have no doubt that he planned it that way on purpose. It was February 2006. His home on the Idaho side of the Tetons was buried under six feet of snow from a blizzard that had roared down from Canada and locked the whole region in its icy grip. There were no flights in or out of Driggs for a week, and once I finally arrived, I was prevented from carrying out his final wishes because the particular bend in the Teton River where I was to stand and scatter his ashes in reverence and mourning was frozen so solid that the idea of a trout jumping in spring seemed to be the stuff of myth” (pp. 1-2).*

This is from The Only True Genius in the Family by Jennie Nash.

My second teaser:

“Months later, wrestling the personal and historical demons my search had set free, I would look back on the first six weeks I lived in Krakow—lovely weeks spent strolling the square—and wonder if I had known something then, if a part of me had seen the future and divined the grief about to visit my family. I would look back on entire days devoted to ‘cultural reconnaissance’ and wonder if I wasn’t just savoring the last dance before an end to the party. It seemed easier at the time to attribute the delay in my search to something cosmic, to believe it served some purpose beyond the drag of my own fear” (p. 1).

This is from The Pages in Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home by Erin Einhorn.

Both sound very promising to me (and I will probably wind up reading them back to back).

*Note that this quote comes from an ARC and therefore may have been changed for final printing.