Sunday Salon

Good morning, Sunday Saloners.  I am settled down with my favorite french vanilla coffee, just finished paying my bills, and now it’s time to tackle the massive to do list that I have for the day.  But I thought I’d catch up with you all first.  How were your weeks?  Mine was very busy.  We were short-staffed at work all week because we had a few people away on a conference in another state, so those of us who were there worked our tails off.  It’s not like I worked overtime – I work in a bank, and banks are only open so many hours per day – but it’s more like, no breaks, no lunch, barely time to have a sip of water, that kind of busy.  It was good, though.  I appreciate the busyness because when work is slow I get bored very easily.  I plan to enjoy this Sunday off before beginning a whole new week tomorrow!

In good news, my husband and I may have finally found a church here in our new home.  We were very close with our church family back where we used to live, and ever since we moved a month ago we’ve been attending a different church service every weekend, trying to find the perfect fit for us.  Last week, we attended a service that we really enjoyed in a church that felt like a decent fit for us, so we went back again last night.  The service was pretty good once again, so we spoke with the woman in charge of connection groups, just letting her know that we were new and looking to get in touch with other members of the church family.  So we will see!  It is not perfect, and of course we miss our old church family so dearly, but the two messages we saw were stellar and everything else about it mostly fits what we look for in a church for our needs.  It is a nice feeling that we can go back to a place we are already somewhat familiar with next weekend.

This week I only managed to post two reviews, The Girl on Legare Street and The Faith Club.  If you take a look at my books read page, you will see that I am currently five reviews behind.  Yikes!  I hope to knock out a few of those today so that they will be ready to post this week.

I am currently reading five books.  Here they are:

East of Eden, still working on this one for the Classic Reads Book Club.

Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr.  This is my current audiobook for my car, and I believe I only have one disc left.  So look for a review on this one soon(ish)!

Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini.  This one is for a book tour in early February.

Wounded by Claudia Mair Burney.  This is for a roundtable I’m going to be a part of in early February.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.  I’ve been meaning to read more Atwood for years, so I finally bit the bullet and picked it up.  I just started it, but I was drawn in immediately, so that’s a great sign of things to come!

Well, that’s about it for me this Sunday.  What’s going on with you?

The Faith Club by Ranya Idilby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner

Title: The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew – Three Women Search for Understanding

Authors:  Ranya Idilby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner

Release date:  October 2, 2006

Publisher:  Free Press

Pages:  416

Genre:  Nonfiction, religion, memoir(ish)

Source:  Personal copy

After 9/11, New Yorker and Muslim Ranya Idilby wanted to both educate her children about their religion and show children of the world how Muslims are not so different from everyone else.  She spoke with a fellow mother at her daughter’s school, Suzanne Oliver, who she knew was a Christian, about collaborating on a childrens’ book about religion.  Suzanne got in contact with Priscilla Warner, a Jewish woman living in a New York suburb, about the project, and she agreed to join.  Thus, the Faith Club was born.  The three women would get together, every week or couple of weeks or so, for a few years, and talk about their respective religions.  What started out as the three of them writing a childrens’ book turned into so much more – the women became truly close friends, they were able to share their deepest fears and doubts about the other two religions (and their own) with one another, and they came to a real, honest understanding of their own religions as well as the religions of the other women.  All three women said that not only did they come away with deep respect for all religious traditions, but also with deeper understanding and faith in their own religion.

I got The Faith Club from BookMooch ages ago.  I’ve truly been meaning to read it for a long time, but the Social Justice Challenge finally inspired me to actually pick it up.  The Faith Club was everything I expected – a frank discussion about three major religions, an honest analysis by three regular women about what religion means to each of them, and an examination of their own prejudices and preconceived notions of the other two womens’ religions.

The moral of this story is that we shouldn’t judge people or make assumptions about somebody based on their religion.  These three women, as educated, intelligent, accepting, and understanding as they were, all had prejudices about the other two religions that they were forced to confront upon their collaboration.  They were also forced to examine their doubts about their own beliefs – Suzanne’s doubt that Jesus is the only way to Heaven, Ranya’s doubt that some of the more extremist parts of Islam are actually required by God, and Priscilla’s doubt that God exists at all, among others.  They found that talking through their fears and doubts, and explaining to the other women why they believe what they do, really helped to formulate a true understanding and solid foundation of their faith.

I really don’t have much else to say about The Faith Club except that I highly recommend picking it up for yourself.  It is a great analysis of these three religions, and if you belong to any of the three of them, as I do, you will find yourself examining your own beliefs as you read.  The book definitely gave me a lot of food for thought and, although I am pretty secure in my faith, caused me to think about God in a whole new way.  I found a lot of what Ranya and Priscilla had to say really resonated with me, even though technically they believe in different things than I do. The Faith Club really brought to my attention the fact that God is many things to many people, and these things are not necessarily right or wrong – they just are.  For me, God = Love, and reading The Faith Club truly solidified that in my mind.

If you are at all interested in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, read this book.  You won’t regret it.

The Girl on Legare Street by Karen White

Title:  The Girl on Legare Street

Author:  Karen White

Release date:  November 3, 2009

Publisher:  NAL Trade

Pages:  352

Genre:  Fiction, mystery

Source:  Publisher

In this follow-up to White’s The House on Tradd Street (my review), Melanie is back to restoring old houses and solving the mysteries inside them.  This time, it’s her grandmother’s old home, now owned by her estranged mother, which she is restoring.  And although her mother is back in her life after having disappeared for thirty years, Melanie isn’t sure she can work cohesively with her and is dead set on the fact that she will never forgive her.  Unfortunately for her, though, there is someone in the house who wants them torn apart – a ghost of her family’s past who knows that Melanie and her mother are stronger together, and she needs them weak so she can get what she wants.  It is up to Melanie, her mother, and Jack Trenholm (yes, he’s back of course) to figure out who this ghost is, what she needs, and how to get her out of the house forever.

After recently discovering Karen White’s books and reading The House on Tradd Street, I was really excited to finally get to The Girl on Legare Street.  I enjoyed Melanie the first time I met her, and I was pleasantly relieved to find that she hadn’t changed a bit between the two books.  She was just as stubborn, anal, and hysterically unself-aware as before.  I think I like her so much because she is a realistic character – instead of doing what the reader wants her to do, she sticks to her guns and makes all these silly and sometimes idiotic choices, because let’s face it, that’s what people really do.  They do dumb things because they’re trying to protect themselves from being hurt, or because their pride is too strong, or whatever.  Melanie is so great because she does what’s real.

As much as I love Melanie and I like that she acts in a realistic way, I found it very weird that Melanie and Jack’s relationship seemed to have backtracked a few steps.  At the end of the first book, they had made some significant gains in their relationship, yet as The Girl on Legare Street began, they seemed to be right back where they started from – they clearly had feelings for each other, but they were both too stubborn or too scared to do anything about it.  I was hoping that their relationship would progress throughout this book even more than it had before, but unfortunately there was a huge obstacle thrown in which prevented that from happening.  It was still funny to read about them, about all their “almost kisses”, but I was just hoping to get more from their relationship.  Although the end of this book definitely set the stage for another sequel, so we’ll just have to see what happens later on.

I absolutely loved the mystery aspect of the novel.  It really just grabbed me right away and did not let go.  I was just as interested to find out who this ghost was as Melanie and Jack were.  I liked that Melanie’s mother, Ginnette, played a significant part in solving the mystery.  I had a hard time getting over the fact that she had left Melanie so long ago, and stayed away for so many years, but I still liked her character.  Especially once I understood a bit more about why she left, I still didn’t feel that she was justified, but I respected her character a little more.

I highly enjoyed The Girl on Legare Street, and if you like mysteries with great characters and some humor, I’d highly recommend these books.

POC Reading Challenge/African Dispora Challenge

Just wanted to make a quick announcement that I’ll be joining the POC Reading Challenge for 2010.  I was really inspired by Eva’s post on reading in color, and upon further examination of my own statistics, I realized that in 2009 only about 10% of my reading was books written by people of color.  A few other books featured POC, but were written by non-POC, so I didn’t count those.  But I really would like to make more of a commitment to focus on broadening my reading horizons.  And that includes reading from all cultures.  So the POC Reading Challenge should really help this.  I’m going to commit to level 5, which is reading 16-25 books either written by POC authors or featuring POC characters (or both, of course).  I hope to read more than 100 books this year, so ideally I’d like to read more than 25, but I’m not going to promise too high here.  So there you have it.

I also will be joining the African Dispora Challenge.  This challenge focuses on reading books written by authors of African descent.  I have committed to reading only four books, but truly I hope to read many more than that.

I really thought I was done joining challenges for the year, but these two really got me thinking.  I just HAD to join them!

If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Title:  If I Stay

Author:  Gayle Forman

Release date:  April 2, 2009

Publisher:  Dutton Juvenile

Pages:  208

Genre:  Young adult fiction

Source:  Library

In one moment, seventeen-year-old Mia is traveling in the car with her family, and in the next moment, she is standing outside her own body as she watches the aftermath of the horrific crash they were all involved in.  She watches as both of her parents are pronounced dead, and her younger brother is taken to a hospital in critical condition.  Then she watches as she is taken to another hospital, put in the intensive care unit, and hooked up to about a million machines to keep her alive.  Mia realizes that she’s lingering somewhere between life and death, and it is up to her to stay in this world or go, to whatever lies beyond.  She watches as her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriend, and best friend beg her lifeless body to stay alive, and she must make a choice.  She must make a decision about whether she can live a life without her parents, and possibly without her brother.  Is life even worth living if your entire world has disappeared?

If I Stay is an emotionally charged novel about one girl’s ultimate choice.  She has to decide to live or die, and she has to make this decision with the knowledge that her entire world as she knows it is shattered with the death of both her parents.  It is almost a surreal experience, reading If I Stay, because Mia is having a surreal experience herself – she is watching herself die, basically.  She is watching her boyfriend cry over her limp body, watching her best friend comfort her grandparents, and all the while feeling like she just might want to die.  She just might not want to deal with the kind of life she’s facing if she stays.  It was such an interesting experience for me to be inside Mia’s head while she was trying to decide what she should do, while she was watching her entire life change so drastically in front of her eyes.  She was a great character, she loved her family so much, loved her boyfriend, and loved her friends, she was such a sweet person and for her, she couldn’t imagine going through the rest of her life without her family by her side.  So for her, this really was a tough choice – she truly could not decide if she had the strength to go on.

This novel was shorter than I was expecting, and as a result I think I didn’t love it as much as I had thought I would.  It definitely packs an emotional punch, and I did fly through it in one sitting, but I think I was hoping to be blown away and I simply liked it.  This is not a criticism, this is just a reminder to myself (as usual) to lower my expectations!

I definitely enjoyed If I Stay. I really liked Mia and would have read about her for at least another 100 pages.  The story between Mia and her boyfriend was a sweet romance, and even though it was a small part of the book, I felt like I got to know him through Mia’s explanations of their relationship.  Forman really created the atmosphere I was looking for, it was haunting and surreal, and I really believed that Mia was speaking from a place of being in between life and death.  I definitely enjoyed this young adult novel and I would recommend it.

No Time to Wave Goodbye by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Title:  No Time to Wave Goodbye

Author:  Jacquelyn Mitchard

Release date:  September 15, 2009

Publisher:  Random House

Pages:  228

Genre:  Women’s fiction

Source:  Library

No Time to Wave Goodbye takes place thirteen years after the conclusion of Mitchard’s novel The Deep End of the Ocean.  Vincent, the oldest Cappadora son, has recently produced a documentary film about five families who have suffered the effects of child abduction.  Ben, the younger Cappadora boy, who was abducted in the first book and found nine years later, completely unharmed but with a new name and new parents, of course helped Vincent with the film as he was its inspiration.  On the night of the Academy Awards, just when the Cappadora family thinks their life couldn’t possibly be any more perfect, tragedy strikes, and suddenly everyone is thrust back into the same nightmare they suffered over a decade ago.

I have to apologize that even that small summary I wrote absolutely HAD to contain spoilers for The Deep End of the Ocean.  So, if you plan to read that in the future, please just stop reading this review – I really don’t want to spoil anything for you!

As soon as I heard about this book, I was anxious to read it because I’d loved The Deep End of the Ocean when I first read it years ago.  I couldn’t wait to find out what had happened to the Cappadora family since the book’s conclusion.  I have to admit to being a little disappointed in this sequel, but really that’s a testament to my high expectations for it.  There really were a lot of good things about the novel.

First of all, Mitchard has a real talent for creating complex, realistic, interesting characters that are anything but one-note.  While I got to know Beth, Pat, and Vincent Cappadora in the first book, Mitchard really develops their characters quite a bit further in No Time to Wave Goodbye.  The reader can really see how the trajectory of all of their lives were so influenced by Ben’s kidnapping.  All of the characters in the book, including Ben and Kerry (who was just a baby when he was kidnapped), were profoundly changed by the events of thirteen years ago, and what happens in No Time to Wave Goodbye really shows that.

I definitely enjoyed the plot of this novel.  There was just enough suspense to keep me going, to keep me on my toes as I read (or, in my case, listened) about this family.  I did have an issue with the pacing, though – I felt like there wasn’t enough action in the first half of the book.  The main plot in the novel – the tragedy that occurs – doesn’t take place until almost halfway through, and I just wish Mitchard had spent less time developing things and more time just getting to the main focus of the story.  Still, I was interested to know as much as I could about the Cappadoras so I can’t say that I disliked the lead-in to the main event.  But I think portions could have been omitted and the action could have been a larger part of the story.

Overall, No Time to Wave Goodbye was a nice conclusion to the Cappadora family for me.  I loved learning more about these characters, and while the book wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I’m still glad I read it.  If you read and enjoyed The Deep End of the Ocean, I would recommend following it up with No Time to Wave Goodbye.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Title:  White Teeth

Author:  Zadie Smith

Release date:  April 25, 2000

Publisher:  Vintage

Pages:  464

Genre:  Literary fiction

Source:  Personal copy

White Teeth is a complex family saga involving three families and two generations.  Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal serve together in the English army during World War II, and remain friends in London after the war, after Archie marries the beautiful Jamacian Clara and Samad marries fellow Bengali Alsana.  Alsana and Samad have twin sons, Magid and Millat, and Archie and Clara have a daughter at the same time, Irie.  After Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh to be educated, Millat and Irie form a friendship with classmate Joshua, whose parents, Marcus and Joyce, become very close with and protective of Millat.  The challenges these families face come to a head when, eight years after going to Bangladesh, Magid returns, a completely different person, and forms an odd friendship and working partnership with Marcus. White Teeth is a book about the immigration experience, about marriage, about the difficulties in raising children, and about how many challenges the average family really has in day to day life.

I am going to say something that I think will be quite unpopular:  I really didn’t like this book.  I think perhaps I missed the point.  When I started it, the characters drew me in immediately, and I cared about them, I cared about their lives, I was completely intrigued by what might happen to them.  Then, 200 pages later, they began to annoy me.  And 200 pages after that, they had really annoyed me and I was extremely glad the book was almost over.  Then it ended, and I was left wondering why I bothered to finish it.

I know that’s harsh, and usually if I dislike a book I don’t even make it past the first fifty or so pages.  But in this case, the book had a lot of promise in the beginning, which is why I kept reading.  And throughout, there would be scenes I liked, parts that made me laugh or almost cry, and characters I was especially drawn to.  So it wasn’t all bad.  It’s just that, at the end of the day, I truly did not understand what Smith was trying to accomplish.  And if I was looking to read White Teeth for entertainment value alone, well I certainly didn’t get that.  The characters were all just so annoying.  Truthfully, I didn’t connect with any of them and that’s my biggest pet peeve when it comes to books – I need to find something to connect with at least one of the characters.  I need something to latch onto, something I can understand or at least like about them.  And I didn’t get that at all with this book.

The book wasn’t horrible by any means, it just did not speak to me personally.  I was engaged with the plot, for the most part, and I still found certain aspects of the novel interesting and readable.  But in general, I did not enjoy the book too much and I would hesitate to recommend it to a friend.  Other bloggers have loved it, though, so don’t take my word for it – check out other reviews before making a decision.

For those of you who have read White Teeth, what did you think?  Am I totally crazy that I did not enjoy the book?

Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

Title:  Love is the Higher Law

Author:  David Levithan

Release date:  August 25, 2009

Publisher:  Knopf Books for Young Readers

Pages:  176

Genre:  Young adult fiction, historical fiction

Source:  Library

On Friday, September 7, 2001, Claire, Peter, and Jasper all attend a mutual friend’s party.  Claire and Peter are acquaintances who are seniors at a New York City high school.  Jasper is a college freshman, just wrapping up his summer at home.  Peter and Jasper have a fun night together, and plan a date for the following Tuesday.  Then Tuesday happens – 9/11 – and everything changes. Love is the Higher Law is a book about the After.  About how nothing was the same after the towers fell, about how these three teens changed drastically having seen the tragedy play out in their backyard.  And about how no matter how devastating something might seem, there is always love to be found.  Because love really is the higher law.

I’m actually surprised that I haven’t read too many books that deal with 9/11.  The only other one that comes to mind is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  I wasn’t intending to read a book about September 11 when I picked this one up – I saw that it featured a relationship between two teen boys and decided to read it for the GLBT challenge.  But, I’m telling you, I got so much more from this book than I was expecting.  It kind of took my breath away.

What got me about Love is the Higher Law was the raw emotion.  Everyone remembers exactly where they were on 9/11/01, and for Claire, Jasper, and Peter, they were right in the city as the terrifying event was taking place.  Reading about these characters’ experiences really hit home for me because I was their age on 9/11.  I was a high school senior, I was sitting in class when the first plane hit, and I remember so vividly the million emotions that were going through my head at the time.  And I was all the way in Chicago, far away from the physical danger of it all.  To even imagine being in New York City, in high school no less, as the towers fell, well the idea of that just sends shivers through me.  The way these three characters dealt with the disaster and the emotional rollercoaster that came after it really brought up memories of my own experiences surrounding 9/11.

Levithan truly captured the essence of New York City post-9/11.  I’ve never even been to New York, but through his words I felt transported there.  I could feel the sidewalk below my feet, I could smell the smoke in the air, I could see the tears on the faces of New Yorkers.  It was such a surreal experience, reading this book.  I absolutely love when an author can create a sense of a place this well, and in this case it was a heartbreaking sense of place, but amazing just the same.  I felt like I was right there with Claire, Jasper, and Peter, as they experienced the city.

The relationships between the characters, especially the on/off relationship between Jasper and Peter, were very well-written, but honestly they kind of took a backseat to each characters’ relationship with New York City.  The city and the tragedy that befell it meant different things to each of the three of them – and experiencing it through their eyes was such an experience.

I know that I haven’t done this book justice, because I really, really loved it, and I’m not too good at expressing that love properly.  I highly recommend picking it up. Love is the Higher Law is a book that I know will stick with me for a long, long time.

The Sunday Salon

Good morning, Saloners, and welcome to my first Sunday Salon of 2010!  It is a gorgeous day here in Orlando, and I’m really hoping that we’ll be able to enjoy the outdoors in some way today.  Last night some young girls in my neighborhood found a stray kitten that ended up following them around all day, and I told them that if she came back today, I would take her to the humane society or another animal shelter.  Unfortunately, their parents won’t let either of them keep her, and we have three cats already – plus the kitten has fleas, so I don’t want to bring her into my house for even a night and have the fleas pass to my cats.  I felt so bad for these kids – one of the girls was actually crying because she was so sad that they weren’t able to find a home for the kitten.  So right now I’m just waiting around for them to knock on my door with the kitten to take to a shelter.  So hopefully that issue will be solved by early afternoon, and I can peacefully enjoy the rest of my day.

I haven’t been much in the mood to write reviews lately.  I’m not sure why, but it took me a good week to muster up the energy to write my most recent review.  Consequently, this week I only managed to post two reviews:  Spellbinder and Committed.  I have three reviews pending, and one that I’ve written and will go up tomorrow, so look for at least three this week.

Right now I’m currently reading:

The Hobbit and East of Eden are both for read-a-longs, Love in the Present Tense is my current audiobook for driving, The Faith Club is for the Social Justice challenge, and The House on Legare Street is my attempt to get more caught up on my backlog of review books.  I am enjoying all of them so far, but I must admit that I’m finding The Hobbit to be not nearly as good as I remember it being from when I read it the first time.  I suppose the way a twelve-year-old reads a book and the way a twenty-six-year-old reads a book are different things, and I should probably have expected a different reading experience.  But I do confess that I’ve been feeling a bit disappointed in it so far.  Oh well, we’ll just have to see how the rest of the Lord of the Rings books work out for me.

Anyway, I’m off to get a couple of reviews written if I can, and I do hope to get outdoors sometime today too!  Happy Sunday everyone!

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

Title:  Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Author:  Elizabeth Gilbert

Release date:  January 5, 2010

Publisher:  Viking Adult

Pages:  304

Genre:  Nonfiction, memoir

Source:  Library

At the end of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, she met and fell in love with Brazillian-born, Bali resident Felipe.  They knew they were in love and would be together, faithfully, forever, but both had absolutely awful marriages in their pasts, and were completely against marriage. Committed finds them at a turning point in their relationship – the United States homeland security decides that Felipe simply can’t come in and out of the U.S. every three months like he’s been doing for a few years, and if Liz and Felipe want to be together, they have no choice but to get married.  So what does Gilbert, who is terrified of marriage, do?  She undertakes the duty of researching marriage in order to get familiar with the institution, to understand what about it she is so averse to, and to find a way to make her own marriage one she can be fully happy about and thankful for.  She examines the history of marriage, how marriage affects different types of people in different ways, what marriages have been like in her own family, and her own prejudices about the institution of marriage.  Ultimately, she comes away with the understanding that love is complex and wonderful, difficult but joyful, all at once, and that her own marriage can be whatever she and Felipe make it to be.

Okay, first of all, I have to say one thing up front:  I am fully and unequivocally in love with Elizabeth Gilbert.  I know that opinions about Eat, Pray, Love were all over the board, especially in the blogging world, but I cannot adequately express how much I loved that book.  I just felt such a kinship with Gilbert… I really connected to her, for some reason, what she said and how she said it truly resonated with me and I just loved reading about her journey.  So, clearly, I have a little bias when it comes to Committed – I expected to love it, and I actually did.

I, too, was skeptical of marriage before I got married.  Not skeptical to the point where I didn’t want to enter into it, but skeptical because I’ve seen the result of my parents’ disastrous marriage – and I know that when they got married, they were totally in love.  I’ve always tried to figure out, among my friends’ and family members’ relationships, what makes some couples work for the long haul and others just can’t make it happen.  I love my husband and I believe in our relationship, but before we got married, I thought of divorce as something that just happened to you.  I feared that one day, I would wake up and we just wouldn’t work anymore.  Now I think that is certainly possible, and in some marriages perhaps that happens, but for us we both work hard to make sure that we have a strong marriage.  Really, we are still newlyweds (2.5 years), so I am probably just speaking from a place of ignorance more than anything else at this point.  But I will say that my views on marriage have changed a lot since before I got married.  So that’s one reason I loved Committed so much.

What I liked about it the most, I think, is the examination of Gilbert’s own experiences of marriages and her analysis of how her own prejudice and preconceived notions were tarnishing her ability to see how she could have a happy marriage of her own.  Upon examining her parents’ marriage, her grandmother’s marriage, her sister’s marriage, and the history of marriage, she really was able to develop her own ideas about what she wanted for her own marriage.  The conclusion she came to really stuck with me – marriage is so individual.  Each of us brings our own stuff into a marriage, good and bad, and it’s up to each couple to make things work for them.  Some figure it out, some do not.  I personally plan to learn from the marriages I’ve seen succeed and the marriages I’ve seen fail – I think that my husband and I both have stuff we have to figure out, and it will take years of practice for us to establish a pattern and a marriage that works for us.  But I do believe in our ability to do it.

Ultimately, marriage is about love.  This is what Gilbert finally understood, as she married Felipe, the love of her life.  Marriage does not have to be a certain way, it is shaped by the individuals within the union.  But really, it’s all about love.  Love for each other, love for your family, love for your common goals, and for your own individual aspirations – this is what Gilbert got out of her research, and that’s how she and Felipe started their own marriage.

I know that this book isn’t for everybody, but I really liked it.  I continue to adore Elizabeth Gilbert and will read anything else she writes.