Similar Covers: Hands (Part 5)

Some of you may remember that, back in January of last year, I posted a bunch of book covers featuring two hands forming a heart. As I said in that post, the first two, Girl Goddess #9 by Francesca Lia Block (which appears to have been first published in 1996 by Harper Collins Canada) and The World I Made for Her by Thomas Moran (first published by Riverhead Books in 1998), featured the same image. I’ve just now found a third: The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery by Katherine Govier (first published in 1994, but I’m not sure the hardcover had this cover).

I have to say that the cover for The Immaculate Conception is the only one I actually kinda like—and even it seems a bit dull (although it may look better in person). The other two covers are too cluttered for my taste.

Other “similar covers” posts featuring hands: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Review and Giveaway: Home to Woefield by Susan Juby

Home to Woefield by Susan Juby (published in Canada under the title The Woefield Poultry Collective) is the story of Prudence, a YA-author-turned-organic-farmer, who inherits a dilapidated and scrubby farm from her Great-Uncle Harold. Delighted with this opportunity to make her dreams come true, Prudence enlists the help of several locals: Earl, the gruff 70-something foreman who came with the property; her neighbour, Seth, a celebrity blogger who hasn’t left his house since an unfortunate incident involving his high-school drama teacher; and 11-year-old Sara Spratt, who’s looking for a home for her prize-winning chickens. Told in the alternating voices of these four characters, Home to Woefield is a side-splittingly funny and thoroughly modern back-to-the-land tale.

I briefly entertained the notion that I wasn’t going to like this book—for the first few chapters, I was a bit worried that Juby was making fun of her characters, who initially seemed like they were going to be caricatures of people whose passions (organic farming and blogging) are dear to my heart. For example, Seth introduces himself like this:

“Let me paint a picture for you in words. People don’t take my skills seriously, but there’s an art to it. There really is. When I was on a roll, I used to update my blogs eight, sometimes twelve hours a day. That’s eight or twelve hours of writing. Stephen King is probably one of the only other guys who writes that much. Him and James Patterson, although King’s the only one of those two worth reading. I wasn’t creating books, but there was definitely some storytelling happening. My mother used to call my blogging mental diarrhea, and my former father, Prince of Pubs, used to ask me if I was some kind of pervert because I was on the computer so much.” (p. 8)

However, it didn’t take long for me to realize how wrong I was—as it turned out, I snorted and giggled and guffawed through the whole book (and Seth turned out to be the character that cracked me up the most). I read parts of the novel out loud to Mr. B and found myself howling with laughter all over again (who knew that sheep shearing could be so funny?). Juby’s characters are wacky and original—more than once, she retells the same moment from two or three or four points of view, each as funny as the last.

Not surprisingly, this isn’t a very realistic story—although Juby does touch on some sensitive subjects such as alcoholism and family dysfunction—but it’s hilarious, quirky and sweet. If you’re in the mood for a laugh, this is the funniest book I’ve read in a long time—in fact, I can’t remember the last time a book made me laugh so much or so hard. I highly recommend it.

Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me this book to review.
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Home to Woefield is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in March. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Sara’s Organized Chaos • BookNAround (spoiler alert) • Colloquium (spoiler alert) • A Musing Reviews • A Bookworm’s World • Rundpinne • The Lost Entwife • Reviews by Molly • Tina’s Book Reviews • Book Club Classics! • Chrisbookarama

HarperCollins Canada also organized a Woefield blog tour:

The Written Word • Shelf Candy • Daisy’s Book Journal • The Literary Word • Failing the Rorschach Test • Burning Impossibly Bright • Mrs Q Book Addict

Other reviews:

Booking Mama • faerie writer • Hey, I want to read that • Leafing Through Life • Rayment’s Reading, Rants and Ramblings

Interviews with the author: Daisy’s Book Journal • Night Owl Reviews

Check out Phase II of the Great Hen Bag Giveaway on Susan Juby’s blog. (I want that hen bag!)

Susan Juby is going to be on Blog Talk Radio with Book Club Girl on Tuesday, April 5, at 7 p.m. ET.
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Would you like to win a copy of Home to Woefield? Harper Collins has offered to send a copy to one of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Friday, April 8.

If you are a follower or subscriber, let me know and I will give you another entry.

Make sure you provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries without a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.
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Guest Post and Giveaway: Dani Shapiro, Author of Devotion: A Memoir

I’m thrilled to be able to offer you this guest post by Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir, as part of the TLC Book Tours for her book (read my review).
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While I was writing Devotion I came upon the Sanskrit term samskara. A yoga teacher explained one day during class that samskaras are the tensions, pressures, memories, stored in our bodies that are sometimes released through the practice of yoga. Someone might be in the middle of a pose—say, a very simple forward bend, and find herself suddenly weeping. Or laughing. Or shaking. Why? Because a samskara has been activated, released. I found this whole idea completely compelling, revelatory. As a writer, I found myself thinking that samskaras are like stories. Our stories, embedded in our bodies. They never entirely go away, do they? What has happened to us during the course of our lives continues to live inside of us. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a very beautiful thing, if we understand it properly. Nothing ever really goes away.

Just last week, I found myself grappling with a samskara for the first time in a while. I wasn’t doing my yoga practice. I wasn’t meditating. No. I was on Ninth Avenue in New York City, leaving a restaurant with another couple after a long dinner. The two men—my husband and our friend Jack—were walking ahead, having hailed a taxi. I was trailing behind with our friend Holly, talking. Not paying attention to where I was going, or the slick pavement, or the high heeled boots I was wearing, when suddenly, I was down. Down, so, so, fast. I fell forward, somehow (I have no memory of this) and landed on my knee, and on my cheekbone. My face pressed into the concrete of Ninth Avenue.

Fortunately—and somewhat miraculously—I wasn’t hurt nearly as badly as I could have been. My knee took the brunt of it, and my face somehow didn’t get bruised. Holly and my husband helped me off the street. Shaken, I got into the taxi. I kept moving. There was talk of stopping for ice, of going back to their apartment. I wondered if I was more badly injured than I felt. I had hit my face full-force, after all. But I kept moving, kept going. We took the taxi uptown, got our car, and my husband and I started the two-hour journey home.

Here’s the thing. That fall set off a samskara for me. The next morning, I was completely shaken. Teary. Twenty-five years earlier, my parents had been in a terrible car accident that killed my father and gravely injured my mother. It was my introduction to suddenness, to randomness, to the thin, thin veil that separates us at any given moment from mortal danger. From change. Illness. Accidents. Death. I carry that knowledge—that story, that samskara—within me. I don’t think about it very often, but when I fell that night on Ninth Avenue, it was reawakened in me. Oh, it seemed to be saying. Remember this?

The feeling passed. A day, or two, and I no longer felt that jarred, frightened feeling. I no longer felt on the verge of tears. I was grateful to be okay. But my body had reminded me that everything that has ever happened to me remains alive within me. A story. A samskara. A slip and fall on Ninth Avenue brought to life a fatal car accident on a snowy highway twenty-five years earlier. It reminded me of life’s randomness, life’s fragility. It also reminded me to count my blessings. There is much we can learn from what we carry with us.
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Would you like to win a copy of Devotion? Harper Collins has offered to send a copy to one of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Friday, April 1.

To enter the giveaway:

Please let me know if you’ve ever had an experience with a samskara (even if you didn’t know at the time that that was what it was called) OR tell me why you want to read this book.

If you are a follower or subscriber, please let me know and I will give you another entry.

Make sure you provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries that fail to answer one of the questions or that don’t provide a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

Good luck!

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.

Similar Covers: Birds on a Wire

It’s been a while since I posted a “similar covers”post—I didn’t do a single one in February. (It doesn’t help that my computer crashed, and my whole collection of potential similar covers is currently on a backup drive.) Anyhoo... As my sister Brogan pointed out in a comment on my review of Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude by Emily White, Lonely has a similar cover to The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk. A quick Google search revealed a third lookalike cover, this time for a CD entitled (not surprisingly) Birds on a Wire, Volume 1.

Have you come across any other “birds on a wire” covers?

Edited to add:
As both Brogan and commenter DDay pointed out, Gossip of Starlings by Nina de Gramont also features birds on wires on its cover. I’ve added it above.

Review: Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro

1. As I read Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro, I felt as if I had been waiting for this book, as if somehow Shapiro’s story was meant for me. On the surface, this is a strange notion, as Shapiro and I have little in common: I didn’t grow up in a deeply religious family, my parents are both alive, I don’t have a son who almost died as an infant (in fact, I have no children), I’m not a novelist or memoirist, I didn’t move out of Brooklyn after 9/11 to a farmhouse in Connecticut, I don’t have an impossibly difficult relationship with my mother as Shapiro had with hers. And yet, so many times I found myself nodding yes yes yes in recognition as I read this book.

“I was always racing. I couldn’t settle down. . . . I often felt a sense of tremendous urgency, as if there was a whip at my back. I was fleeing something—but what?” (p. 2)

2. “Anxious, fearful, lonely, resentful, depressed—troubled by a powerful and, some would say, deeply irreverent sense of futility” (p. 11), Shapiro decides to “climb all the way inside the questions and see what was there” (p. 12). Exploring the Orthodox Jewish traditions she grew up with, along with yoga and meditation, she seeks a middle ground between her very religious childhood and her rejection of faith as a young woman.

“Could I find and hold on to a deeper truth than the whir and strum of my daily life, which seemed designed to ensure that some day I would wake up—after the years of packed lunches and piano practice and rushed dinners—and wonder where it had all gone?” (p. 16)

3. Told in 102 short chapters or vignettes, Devotion chronicles Shapiro’s spiritual journey. Sometimes these vignettes are stories, sometimes they are barely more than single moments, flashes of the present, “moments of being,” but each is a piece of the puzzle, a stone in the stream. Inspiring, brave, funny, open-hearted and wise, Devotion invites the reader to follow Shapiro on an incredibly personal journey that will likely resonate with anyone who is searching for meaning in their own lives.

“Yogis use a beautiful Sanskrit word, samskara, to describe the knots of energy that are locked in the hips, the heart, the jaw, the lungs. Each knot tells a story—a narrative rich with emotional detail. Release a samskara and you release that story. Release your stories, and suddenly there is more room to breathe, to feel, to experience the world.” (pp. 16-17)

4. Devotion is a primer, a light shining ahead of me on the path, an inspiration to my own journey through doubt. I highly recommend it. I know I will read it again and again.*

Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me this book to review.

*I’ve already read this book in its entirety twice (and dipped in and out of it as well).
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Devotion is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in February and March. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Kelly’s Lucky You! • Book Club Classics! • {Mis}Adventures of an Army Wife • Books Lists Life • nomadreader • Coffee and a Book Chick • Colloquium • The 3 R’s: Reading, ’Riting, and Randomness • Books in the City • English Major’s Junk Food • The House of the Seven Tails • Boarding in my Forties • Man of La Book • Chefdruck Musings

Other reviews:

A Design So Vast • Beth Kephart Books • Between the Covers • catching days • Coffees & Commutes • MostlyFiction Book Reviews • Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret • The Daily Grind of a Work at Home Mom

Interviews with the author: BookPage • Linus’s Blanket • Shambala SunSpace

Read more Devotion-style vignettes: Devotion blog

The author is also available and very enthusiastic about doing Skype chats with book clubs.
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“I had stepped into a stream and was now being carried
along by an unfamiliar, powerful current.”
(Devotion, p. 29)

Reading Devotion inspired me to create the Stream of Suggestions Reading Challenge. This is my first review for this challenge.
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