Her Mother's Hope, by Francine Rivers

Her Mother's Hope,

Francine Rivers

I picked this one up at a rummage sale along with its sequel---SCORE! I really enjoy Francine Rivers' writing. She seems to really research before writing her stories and I think I have enjoyed each one so far. 

This story is a generational series, starting with a young girl who is abused and controlled by her father, who seeks to enslave her to keep his business going, but she has other plans, and she leaves and ends up travelling through Europe and settling in America. 

Eventually she marries and has children, and in order to keep something she feels was a terrible mistake from happening to one of her children who she considers weak, she goes overboard in her tough-it-out attitude towards her child, and becomes unknowingly like her own father in some ways. 

The second half of the book is about her daughter, who doesn't understand why her mother has always hated her, and her struggles she has to overcome .

It is based on Rivers' own family, the division she saw but could never understand between her own mother and grandmother.

 

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

I have been a big fan of Bill Bryson's for years. I really enjoy his style, and he makes pretty much everything he writes about interesting. 

This book, however, I had some issue with. Yes--it was interesting and he did a great job writing it. My issue is with the blind acceptance and treating as fact some of the popular theories, such as the big bang theory, evolution (one kind of creature turning into a completely different kind), that all dinosaurs died from a meteor hitting the earth etc. 

Yes, I believe in creation by intelligent design and it makes more sense than blindly accepting that nothing magically exploded and created the building blocks of everything which magically and randomly came together into the exact proportions of elements etc to create and sustain life. I just can't get past the blind acceptance of that.

Whether you are an evolutionist or not, though, I think this is a good read. If you don't believe in the theories in this book, it still gives the explanation of how they came to be accepted and what they all entail. I think it's important to know the history of the ideas. And for all the other stuff in the book, it is quite fascinating and put in a way that the lay man can grasp and enjoy, even.

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Creating Art at the Speed of Life, Pam Carriker

Creating Art at the Speed of Life, by Pam Carriker

This is the second art journaling book I have picked up, and like the first one, it's a mixed media collage type of book, with 30 days of exercises. However, each day explores a different aspect of design, such as exploring the color wheel, or composition, line, or texture. I haven't actually done this type of art, as I am an oil painter, but I do like the book and the ideas, and I think it would be fun to explore when I have time to create just for fun rather than for commission. And this book might be good to use if one wanted to teach a class. It's very well thought out.