Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, Joanna Weaver

Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, Joanna Weaver

This book is a gentle reminder to slow down and be in the moment, and take time to build relationships with those around us instead of getting lost in the busy-ness of all the tasks we take upon ourselves to do. 

I don't think I really learned anything new reading this, but sometimes it's good to just take a look at ourselves and bring balance back into our lives. I know I am a very task oriented person, and I can very easily put tasks before relationships. This leaves me exhausted, frustrated, and resentful, but I am the one doing it to myself. It's always beneficial to take a little time to just sit at the feet of Jesus, spend a little time alone with Him and in the Word, and just be.

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The Synthetic Man, Theodore Sturgeon

The Synthetic Man, Theodore Sturgeon

This was a Bookcrossing book that was given to me for my Little Free Library, but I decided to read it first. Vintage sci-fi can be fun to read, and this was an interesting read...can't say I have ever read anything quite like it. Written originally in 1950 under the title "The Dreaming Jewels," this is the story of a young man who is abused as a child by his adopted father and runs away and joins a carnival, where he is taken under the wings of the carnival freaks who work there. He is not like other boys, something about him is just plain different, for example, three of his fingers get cut off, and they grow back. He eats ants sometimes. And he doesn't realize it, but he can make himself look like the sister of one of the carnival freaks, and keep himself from growing into an adult. He doesn't know where he came from, or who he really is, but the woman watching over him has an idea of where he came from, but in order to protect him from the head of the circus, she hides this from him until she no longer can. 

I finished this book in about two days, it was a fun story, written at a time when authors were trying their best to think outside the box, and well, this one is definitely outside the box!

 

The German Heiress, Anika Scott

The German Heiress, Anika Scott

This is the first novel by author and journalist Anika Scott, and is about post-war Germany. I have read books about the holocaust, and I have read books that happen during the war, but I feel we never hear alot about right after World War II. 

This is the story of a previously wealthy German woman, Clara, who helped her powerful father run his iron factory. During WWII ,it was taken over by Nazis, and her family had to decide whether to do what the Nazis wanted, or suffer the consequences; so they, on the surface, complied with the Nazis. However, Clara did her best to make things easier for the prisoners being used as laborers, even through life was brutal for them. However, after the war, she and her father were considered war criminals. Her father was put in a prison camp, but she escaped and took on a secret identity, and hid for a year. In that time she met a suitor, and decided to flee after he proposed and she discovered he was a doctor who experimented on children in the prison camps during the war. She didn't know it but she had been watched, and was now being chased by Allied agents, who wanted to bring her in for questioning. 

While running from the Allies, she uncovers some terrible secrets about her family and her best friend, and finds help, and a friend, in an ex-Nazi soldier.

This book explores post war Germany from the side of the Germans who survived it, and how they had to move forward in a world that, for them, had been completely devastated. 

Would you like to buy me a book, or help keep my little free library stocked and maintained? You can donate here: paypal.me/AmyVanGaasbeck 

 

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See

Here is another lovely story by one of my favorite authors. This is the story between mothers and daughters, starting out in a remote Akha village in China in the 80's. It is about a young woman who falls in love and gets pregnant outside of marriage, and in her village, that means that her child must be killed at birth. However, instead of killing her daughter, her mother takes her to a sacred part of the forest where the women of her family cultivate the ancient tea trees in order to secretly give birth, then she treks across the mountain to the nearest city to take her daughter to an orphanage.  

Later, the man she loves returns and they marry, and she tells him of their daughter, and so they go to retrieve her, but find that she has been adopted by Americans. Her heart is with her daughter, always longing for her, but she must move on with her live, through tragedies and major changes.

Meanwhile, her daughter, adoped to a loving family, with only an antique tea cake on her person to give any clue to her identity, goes through her own struggles in America, and becomes obsessed with learning about the tea cake and her identity. She ends up learning much about the Pu'er tea made in China, and being intellectually gifted, pursues learning about the chemical and medicinal properties.

This tea cake ties them together, will it bring them together as well? 

I really enjoyed this book. It was different from her other stories, in that we learned about the Akha villages and how different they are from mainstream China. I also learned about the tea trade and how lucrative it has been historically. Not being a tea drinker, I have known nothing about tea, so I felt this gave me a bit of education on that as well.

Would you like to buy me a book, or help keep my little free library stocked and maintained? You can donate here: paypal.me/AmyVanGaasbeck 

 

Unveiled, by Cherry Mosteshar

Unveiled, Cherry Mosteshar

This is the autobiography of Cherry Mosteshar, a successful journalist and ghost writer, currently based in Great Britain. She is Iranian by birth, but grew up in Great Britain in her formative years. She went back to Iran as an adult and as a journalist, and lived through Hell. She was used to having liberties and rights in Great Britain, but was forced to cover up in Iran under Muslim rule, as well as live under obedience to the men around her. She tells about many of her family members and other people she knew and the things they went through, so much difficult and tragic stuff, it's hard to wrap one's mind around it, because I do not live in a country where you are constantly interrogated and guilty until proven innocent, you must pay bribes to go anywhere, do anything, be seen by doctors, get any kind of assistance at all....you are constantly watched and neighbors will report you for anything that might be a perceived infraction of moral or political law.

She tells of her courtship to a man named Muhammad, how he started out mild mannered and once engaged, turned into a lazy, abusive, evil monster, and she learned after marriage that he was still married to his first wife, making Cherry the second wife. He raped her, he beat her, and he lived off her money. There was no way she could divorce him according to their law, unless he consented, which he never did. She eventually went back to Great Britain and she refused to go back to Iran in the end, although he still would not divorce her. 

We in the United States are so fortunate we have rights and for the most part, those rights are protected. Any woman under Muslim law loses her rights and must live according to what her husband, father, brother, or son decides. She must have permission from her husband to travel, even. She is seen as inferior, and no matter what she does, she is looked at as a whore if she is not covered from head to toe. 

I am so thankful for my life, and I was so thankful that the author was able to escape the terrible marriage she was in and escape her home country in the end. I hope she was able to find peace and healing. I was not able to find out a lot about her, looking her up, but she is a ghost writer and has written many books in collaboration with others.