A Spirited Mind HomeAboutMotheringContemplationReadingPreschoolCreativityHomemaking

Sibling Rivalry and the Full Plate Diet – Week in Books #35

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on September 3, 2010

I bought Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends at a garage sale thinking it would help me encourage my children to be better friends.  As it turns out, the book is really more geared toward kids who might want to be better friends with their siblings.  The book was written by three siblings, and I have to say that I found the writing to be tiresome.  But then again, the authors are kids, so I cut them some slack.  If your children are reading on a 6th-ish grade level and are interested in being better friends with each other, they might get something out of this book, but you should read it first because some of the suggestions and what the authors imply are roots of problems might seem a little legalistic or beyond what the Bible actually says or forbids.

Sorry that’s a wishy-washy review, but I call it like I see it.

I received an advance review copy of The Full Plate Diet a long time ago and finally got around to looking it over.  The premise of the diet is that if you can increase your fiber intake, you can lose weight without going hungry.  That’s a valid idea.  However, I felt the authors took the fiber thing too far, to the point of overlooking other useful nutrients that might not contain fiber, such as protein.  They write at one point that the ultimate high fiber diet would be vegan.  Not to get into a vegan/vegetarian/omnivore diet controversy here, but technically there is nothing about a piece of chicken that will sabotage your diet, even if it has less fiber than two cups of beans.  So if you read this book, just don’t go overboard.

Apart from that, I think the book is a helpful reference for fiber content, listing lots of the highest fiber foods from various food groups, and including with a section of high fiber recipes, many of which looked appealing.  The book also has a section on the fiber content of many, many packaged supermarket foods (why they included that when fiber is listed smack dab on the nutrition label is beyond me) and a section on high fiber choices at popular restaurant chains.

If you’re looking to slim down and don’t eat much fiber in your diet, this book would be helpful to you as long as you take it with a grain of salt and aren’t looking for a be-all-end-all diet plan.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also find A Spirited Mind on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

Posted in , | Leave a response

Change Your Thoughts

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on September 1, 2010

One of the reminders I find myself repeating to the children over and over again is “Change your thoughts!” The idea comes from Charlotte Mason’s idea that we need to strengthen our wills to take our thoughts captive (2 Corinthians 10:5) because thoughts and attitudes are habitual and if we indulge the wrong ones we will slip into sinful and destructive behaviors. As Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

Recently a friend and I were discussing how people apply a filter to their thoughts.  Everyone thinks mean or ugly thoughts sometimes and our filters (usually, ideally) keep those from coming out of our mouths in what we say.  My friend opined that the strength of a person’s filter was a better indicator of that person’s character than the actual thoughts, because the filter is the person’s self-control and caring enough to make good choices about words and actions in spite of what the person actually might think.

In some ways, I agree.  Certainly none of us would want to be subject to a neurological disorder or something that allowed us to utter or act on every thought that flits in and out of our brains.  And yet, at the same time, our habits of thinking, where our minds wander when left alone, things we repeat over and over again to ourselves do have a way of impacting who we are. For example, if you constantly think about how annoying someone is, you’ll start to react differently to that person.  But if you determine not to think that way and instead when the person annoys you think of that person’s positive traits, your interaction won’t be as negative.

As I heard myself tell my kids “change your thoughts” last week, to remind them to be kind, to have good attitudes, to stop pouting over not getting their way, I found myself feeling increasingly convicted about my own thought patterns. What thought habits do I have which, if my filter were removed, would hurt others?  Which patterns of thought are making me see my situation unrealistically?  Where could my own attitudes use adjusting?

It strikes me that if my goal  is to be more Christlike, I need to follow the example of 2 Corinthians 10:5 and take every thought captive – to hold up every thought to the standard of Christ.  That’s heavy lifting, but worth pondering.

So how do we change our thoughts? In my experience, it’s not enough to rebuke yourself for thinking something or other, and simple denials don’t work either.  You have to replace the thought with the equal and opposite good thought.

For example (personal experience!) perhaps you mutter to yourself every time you clean your kitchen floor.  “I hate cleaning the kitchen floor.  This linoleum is so wretched.  What on earth possessed us to choose bright white linoleum?  Ugh, this is so horrible I hate this floor.”  Now you could go all Pollyanna and chirp to yourself, “On the contrary!  I love cleaning this floor!”  But you’d be lying to yourself and it wouldn’t last long.  Instead, you could acknowledge the truth in your complaint, but then replace the negative pattern with a positive one.  “I hate cleaning the kitchen floor.  Truly, white linoleum is a dreadful invention.  But I like for my kitchen to be clean to keep my family healthy and to show them I love them enough to care for our house.  I am so grateful to have a house to care for and a family to live in it with me.  I would rather read a book than scrub little dirty footprints off of this floor, but I’m glad to have those six cute and tiny feet running around here.”

That’s a simplistic example, but you see what I mean.

And so I’m working on taking my thoughts captive, and thankful that I have a filter in the meantime since I’m still a work in progress!  It’s always interesting to me that whatever issue I’m working on with the children winds up being a means of conviction for me too.

Posted in , | 1 Response

1001 Healthy Baby Answers – Review and Giveaway!

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 30, 2010

The 1001 Healthy Baby Answers: Pediatricians’ Answers to All the Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask would be a helpful reference to own, especially for first time parents.  The book contains essays by pediatric specialists on a wide array of childhood conditions, common and uncommon, including what the condition looks like, when you need to see a doctor, what potential complications or interactions are, and when you need to go back to the doctor if you’ve already been.

I like the idea of giving answers to questions you might not have thought to ask during an initial diagnosis, especially since I have the tendency to get home and hop on the internet and scare myself with contradictory and unfootnoted information.  This book is helpful because the authors are all credentialed.

That said, if you’re looking for scientific opinions on controversial issues such as vaccinations or chicken pox or whatnot, you’re not going to find it in this volume.  If you’re a crunchy mama, this might not be your book.  On the other hand, even those of us with some tendencies toward natural solutions can benefit from knowing both sides of the story, and I don’t think middle-of-the-road medical opinion should be discounted entirely.

The 1001 Healthy Baby Answers will take a lot of the guesswork out of childhood illnesses, and might save you money if it helps you decide you can wait until office hours rather than hitting the ER at 2am, or if it helps you decide you don’t need to take your child for a sick baby visit at the pediatrician over a set of symptoms.  I think this book would make a great baby shower gift or addition to the library of a new parent.

On that note, the publisher has graciously offered to give away a copy of The 1001 Healthy Baby Answers to a reader of A Spirited Mind.

To enter leave a comment on this post, and for an additional entry become a fan of A Spirited mind on Facebook and then come back and leave another comment letting me know you did.

The giveaway will be open until Friday September 3 at 9pm EST and the winner will be announced in a separate post on Saturday September 4.

Disclosure: The publisher sent me a review copy of this book, but I was not compensated for the review in any other way.  This post contains affiliate links.

Posted in , , , | 19 Responses

How Our Day Goes

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 27, 2010

I’ve been reading a lot of fascinating blog posts from other moms on how a typical day goes at their house.  I think it’s fun to see how other people do things.  So for your perusal I offer what happened at our house this Wednesday.  It’s fairly typical of our life and the type of preschool we do, plus you’ll find out the answer to the popular question “When do you find time to read?”  I had fun with this post; most nights I fall into bed feeling like I didn’t get anything done, but writing down everything I actually do in a day is like a BIG Have Done List (you should try it!).

6:00 I got up, did my Bible reading and prayer time while eating a yogurt, then exercised (I’m doing the Insanity workout now and it’s…insane.  I’ll review it in the future.)

7:15 I’m trying to train the children to stay in their rooms quietly until I come to get them at 7:30.  Ideally they would sleep until then so they get enough rest but on the morning in questions they were already up and singing “This is the day that the Lord has made” to each other.  At least they were not being unruly up there.  I drank a cup of coffee and read the Wall Street Journal on my phone.

7:30 I took a cup of coffee to my husband because he’s not a morning person and then I got the kids.  I made them breakfast, unloaded the dishwasher, made Josh’s breakfast smoothie and packed his lunch.  The kids played outside after they finished their breakfast.  Yes, they were still in their pajamas but whatever.  I cleaned up the kitchen and got out some chicken to defrost for dinner.

8:30 Josh left for work.  I was finally done in the kitchen and the kids were still playing happily so I had another cup of coffee and checked my email and blog reader via my phone (I don’t turn on the big computer until naptime – having the phone available is temptation enough!).

8:45 The kids came in and played in the playroom while I took a lightening fast shower and got dressed, then I got them dressed, we made the beds, and we picked up the playroom toys.

9:30 Recitation.  Ephesians 2:8-10 (our current memory verse), Colossians 3:23-24 (the verse they are memorizing for soccer), the books of the New Testament song, three review verses (these rotate so we don’t forget them).  Our current poem is “Rain” by Robert Louis Stevenson and both Hannah and Jack know it well.  We reviewed two other poems, “Goops” and Emily Dickinson’s “He ate and drank the precious words”.  Finally we recited the days of the week and counted 1-30 and then we sang “Joyful, joyful we adore Thee”.  It sounds like a lot but it goes fast.

9:40 I read to the children with Sarah and Jack sharing my lap and Hannah sitting next to me (subject covered in parentheses):

10:00 I put on a Bach CD of the Brandenburg Concertos (Bach is our composer for this month – we listen to his music and read books about him – I’ll do a post in the future on how we’re handling composer and artist study this year), gave Hannah one page of letters to copy for handwriting, gave Jack a page with his name printed on it twice in vain hope that he will trace it, but actually he just flipped the paper over and drew a picture of his daddy.  After Hannah practiced her handwriting for about 5 minutes she drew some stuff too.  Then they all played Legos.  Meanwhile, I got the ironing done while taking frequent breaks to help them, started a load of laundry and made the snack.

11:00 Snack.  A little late today.  But no one starved.

11:30 Hannah collected some seeds on our walk yesterday so for science we read about seeds and plants and talked about how seeds grow:

Then for geography we looked at our map of the United States and found our state.  We got out our big floor puzzle of the map of the world and put it together, then found our continent, country, and state.  We also found France because we were planning to read books about France for the culture/history part of our day.

After we found France and talked about how long it would take to get there by various means of conveyance, we read books about France or that take place in France, and talked about how you can tell if a book is set in France (pictures of the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame, etc)

12:10 The kids rode their bikes in the cul-de-sac.  I sat on the front step and read my book while also breaking up disputes and watching for cars.

1:00 Lunch

1:30 Listened to Bach again and had quiet play time.  Hannah did her reading lesson (After nearly finishing Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons I realized that Hannah could read but didn’t have a great grasp on lots of phonics rules, so I switched to The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading and we’re reviewing all the phonics rules.  It’s good practice for her.) and then Jack did his reading lesson (He’s getting one lesson per week from the Ordinary Parent’s Guide, so this week he’s learning the sound for E.  He knows the letter sounds but he’s not ready to read yet, so giving him a “lesson” makes him feel included.)  Then we had cleanup time.

2:00 Rest time.  They don’t have to sleep, but they have to be quiet and look at books or something if they aren’t sleeping.  I wrote a blog post, sent some emails, tried to figure out some scheduling stuff for our church nursery, worked on the second draft of my novel, and enjoyed the quiet.

4:00 Snack time.  We had popcorn popped on the stove, and that takes forever because the kids nibble each piece.  Usually they play outside after snack, but the “Chemical Stranger Man” (what Jack calls the TruGreen lawn care guy) came mid-morning and sprayed some fertilizer so I didn’t let the kids in the backyard.  Kids played inside.

5:00 Afternoon walk – I pushed the double stroller 2.5 miles around the neighborhood, Hannah walked most of the way, Jack walked part of the way.  The kids kept an eye out for something interesting to put in their nature notebook and found a butterfly that we think is a Monarch.  We will have to pull out butterfly books for science tomorrow.  Towards the end of our walk we stopped at the neighborhood playground, but didn’t stay long because some big kids were there hogging all the equipment.  While walking we talked about our current habit/character trait that we’re working on: prompt obedience.  We worked on it last year but things got lax this summer.  We also went over the first 27 questions of the children’s catechism.  The last six of those are new and the kids don’t know them yet, so we repeated them twice.

6:00 The kids played in the living room using laundry baskets to pretend to be sea turtles.  The laundry baskets were empty because the dryer had run SIX times without drying the clothes.  I made a mental note to share this terrible fact with my husband when he got home.  Meanwhile, since I had no laundry to fold (bummer!) I read a book and started dinner.  Yes, I can cook one handed while reading.

6:45 Josh came home from the gym but still had to do his weights and take a shower, so I gave the kids their baths.  Then we cleaned up the playroom while listening to the rest of the Brandenburg Concertos.

7:30 We ate dinner and talked about our day.  Then we cleaned up the kitchen and got the kids ready for bed.  Usually we read another story before bed but I was too tired, so we did the short version of the bedtime routine: sing the Gloria Patri, everyone says a prayer, hugs and kisses.

8:15 Kids in bed.  I further tried to figure out the church nursery schedule and remembered that I am abysmal at details and not gifted in the administrative arts.  Hopefully I will not ruin the nursery program.  Then I got an idea for changing a character’s name in my novel draft, and spent too long researching Scotch-Irish immigration to the Carolinas in the 1700s.

10:00 I needed to go to bed, but I was freezing and my muscles hurt like billy-oh from doing the Insanity workouts so I took a bath and read my book.

10:30 Talked to my husband for a little while, then went to bed and lay awake thinking of the various and sundry things I need to do and pondering if I have to declare Swagbucks on my taxes and trying to remember the name of that delicious vegetable salad we used to eat in Germany…

11:30 Finally fell asleep.

I’m linking up this post on the Not Back to School Blog Hop at Heart of the Matter.  If you’re interested in seeing how other moms order their days, check out the other entries!

Posted in , , , , | 5 Responses

Cutting for Stone, Week in Books #34

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 25, 2010

Cutting for Stone is a great book, but I very nearly put it down for good after the first 237 pages.

The book tells the story of a man born in unusual circumstances to an Indian mother and English father, then raised in Ethiopia during a period of political and cultural change, and who grows to be a very fine surgeon in an inner city hospital in America.  The book is rich and detailed, but it would have been much better had the first 237 pages been condensed to about 75 pages.  The beginning meanders and takes unneccesary tangents and presents far too many superflous threads.

If you can get through the first section without getting too weirded out or bored, the remaining 400 pages or so are really great.  I loved the way Verghese made Ethiopia come alive in the text, and his descriptions of Ethiopian food particularly are mouth-watering (if your only exposure to Ethiopian food is that joke in When Harry Met Sally, you need to get out there and try some) and left me craving injera (it’s like a cross between sourdough and pita and it’s amazing).  Moreover, you can tell that Verghese is a physician, because his passion for medicine will make you wish you were a doctor.  I love books that make me completely transported into someone else’s calling like that.  Verghese also handled the political situation in Ethiopia with a balanced and insightful touch.

I do think Cutting for Stone is a good read, but if you pick it up just be aware that the beginning may feel boggy and either skim or just press on.  There are enough good tidbits and necessary plot information interspersed in those 237 pages that you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your life, especially after you finish the rest of the book.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Posted in , | 2 Responses

Meet the Sponsors

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 23, 2010

It’s been a while since I highlighted the blog sponsors whose buttons appear in the sidebar.  I accept ads from businesses and groups that impress me and seem like a good fit for my readers, with great products and good deals.  Without further ado, here are the current sponsors so you can learn more about them and visit their sites:

I hadn’t heard of faithbooking before until I got in touch with Donna from Scrapbook your Christian Faith.  Her website and e-book will walk you through how to document your faith heritage so that your children and future generations can know your story.  I think this sounds like a really neat thing to do, and like something that would make a great gift for other members of your family whose faith stories you might not know.

Adorable Blessings is a great childrens clothing boutique where you can buy unique outfits for girls and boys, as well as bib and burp cloth sets and crayon rolls.  The shop has some new fall clothes in stock so be sure to check it out if it’s been a while since you looked!

Every week Hope is the Word, a great blog about teaching and reading to small children, hosts Read-Aloud Thursday.  This is your chance to link up reviews of childrens books and check out what other parents are reading.  This blog is a great resource!

Babies Online offers lots of free things parents can sign up for, ranging from free subscriptions to parenting magazines to coupons for diapers and baby food, to discounts at other retailers.  I have clicked over several times and found different items on offer, so it might be worth checking out more than once.  I think it’s worth it for the high value diaper coupons alone, but I also turn the free magazines in to the used book store when I’m through with them, and use the proceeds to buy more books.  If you’re near a good used book store, you might consider a few free subscriptions for that purpose too.

If you’re expecting, you can get a personalized weekly pregnancy newsletter with all the information about your baby’s gestational development that week, what you can expect, tips on how to handle common problems and have a healthy pregnancy, as well as other stuff like help picking your baby’s name and whatnot.  When I was pregnant with Hannah, Jack, and Sarah  I enjoyed getting weekly updates so I can keep track of what’s going on with the baby.

I presume you’re familiar with Amazon, right?  :)   When you click through one of the links in my book reviews or on the ad in my sidebar you can make your usual Amazon purchases, but I get a tiny (0-4% usually) referral fee at no additional cost to you.  Plus Amazon doesn’t send me a notification about what you bought, so I won’t judge you if you’re buying neon green patent leather boots or something.  Even if I know you in real life I won’t judge you for the patent leather boots, though I will not ask to borrow them.  You go ahead and rock those boots, girl.  And thank you to the readers who make purchases through my affiliate links, I really appreciate it!

I’ve waxed eloquent before about the various and sundry reasons you should join and use Swagbucks.  If you’re new here, Swagbucks is a search engine that pays you to search the web.  It’s just like google or ask or any of the other search engines, except instead of pocketing the revenue they make from selling ads and clicks like the other companies do, Swagbucks passes some of that bounty on to you.  You can redeem the Swagbucks you earn for all sorts of prizes or even cash to your paypal account, but I still think the best deal is the Amazon gift cards.  Even if you do just one search a day, you will make enough Swagbucks to get a $5 Amazon gift card in a month.  It’s a great program.

As always, thanks for reading A Spirited Mind and for visiting these sponsors!

Posted in | 1 Response

I teach like I decorate

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 20, 2010

A friend of mine recently had her house professionally decorated.  It looks amazing.  While I’d never turn down assistance from a professional decorator, I think I’d have a hard time giving up my eclectic style.  Our house is decorated with a mix of things – interesting pieces I bought when I lived and traveled overseas, antiques I inherited, furniture passed on to us from various family members, and the this and that we’ve accumulated over time.  It fits us, and it goes together fairly well and I don’t feel bad about reorganizing when I need a change. 

This week we started preschool again and it occurred to me that I teach in much the same way that I decorate. It’s hard for me to answer “what curriculum are you using” questions because I pick and choose from all sorts of resources, guided mainly by my love of good literature, my affinity for classics, and the influence of books I’ve read about classical education and British educator Charlotte Mason’s philosophy.  As with decorating, I know what I like when I see it, everything basically goes together, and everything is beautiful (to me at least!), useful, and on purpose.

Charlotte Mason’s motto, “Education is a discipline, an atmosphere, a life” appeals to me because our homes are always centers of learning.  Whether your child goes to school at a brick-and-mortar institution or in your living room, as a parent you are always teaching.  With kids aged four, three, and one, our preschool is really an extension of our regular home life.  My main goal for the year is the same one I laid out for this decade: that Hannah, Jack and Sarah would have tender hearts and love to read. We’re just a little more structured about it during the school year.

If you click on the “Preschool” tab in the header you can read more about how our educational efforts have changed and progressed, and this year I’ll plan to share a little bit here and there on different aspects of what we’re doing for school.  Just know that I’m by no means an expert.  My hope is that those posts will be interesting and useful even if you’re not homeschooling, and please know that I would never want to imply that everyone should do everything exactly the same way we do.  I think it’s fun and instructive to see what other families are up to even if our focuses and goals are somewhat different.

If you have specific thoughts or questions you’d be interested to read about related to our homeschool, feel free to share them in the comments.  Then be sure to come back so you can chuckle at the newbie mistakes I stumble into!

Posted in | 2 Responses

A Gesture Life, Week in Books 2010 #32/33

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 18, 2010

After greatly enjoying Chang-rae Lee’s first book, Native Speaker, I was looking forward to his next work.  While it covers important themes and topics and was well-written, I found A Gesture Life much less engrossing and more difficult to engage with than Lee’s previous work.

I think my problem getting into the book was that the main character is utterly unlikeable, but not in an interesting villainous way.  Rather, he is totally banal, living his life on the surface, never achieving deep relationships, contenting himself with gestures rather than actual acts of conviction (hence the title, “A Gesture Life”).  If you can stick it out through the first section of the novel however, you’ll be much more interested in Lee’s dealing with Japanese occupation armies during World War II.  That topic, while difficult and violent (horrifically so, I should warn you; if you can’t stomach descriptions of wartime atrocities this book is not for you), is important.  One of Lee’s main themes in this book is what political philosopher Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil” – and Lee does an excellent job of showing how ordinary people become complicit in horrible crimes.  As a society we need to understand this about human nature so we can be on the lookout for it in ourselves and our culture.

I was interested that Lee ended the book without any hint of redemption for the main character and wondered what the author was saying with that choice about human capacity for evil, someone’s ability to change, human nature, and so forth.  This really would be an excellent choice for a book club if your club members are inclined to philosophical discussion and can handle historically accurate violence.

I do think A Gesture Life is a worthwhile read, but Native Speaker is more accessible and unique and probably more enjoyable for most readers.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Posted in , | Leave a response

Apologies for Sporadic Blogging and The New Plan

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 16, 2010

I apologize for not following my usual posting schedule this summer.  I spent the past couple of months being completely Overcome By Events (I call this problem “OBE” for short, which is helpful because I suffer from it often and using the acronym makes me feel official).

We returned from our nearly month-long tour of the East Coast relatives, during which time we suffered more medical problems than I prefer (including but not limited to two ER visits) and I concluded that traveling for that long is not conducive to good behavior or overall peacefulness.  Next year we plan to make a much much much shorter trip but still hope to see everyone.  The picture above pretty much captures the month: lots of child wrangling, artistic photo shoots gone awry, kids running off, kids taking dives into concrete, kids needing to go to the bathroom at inopportune moments, and Mama trying to keep her smile on in spite of everything.

Now that we’re home, we’re about to launch into our first official year of homeschooling and I’m also going to attempt to massively revise my novel and keep up with many other obligations and commitments with family, church, and friends.  In order to promote less stress (SERENITY NOW!) and maintain my focus and priorities, I decided to take my blog posting schedule down to three posts per week.  In weeks with a giveaway, I’ll do an additional post to declare the winner.

With that said, are there any topics or types of posts that you particularly like on A Spirited Mind or would like to see more of this fall? If I’m only going to do three posts a week, they had better be good ones, right?

Thanks for sticking with me through the sporadic posting this summer!

Posted in | 8 Responses

Unaccustomed Earth – Week in Books #31b

By Catherine @ A Spirited Mind on August 5, 2010

I enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake so much that I was eager to read her other books.  While her latest collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is also beautifully written, I have to say I didn’t enjoy them as much. 

I love Lahiri’s theme of people caught between cultures, not really belonging anywhere.  The title is taken from a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote:

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.  My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

I suppose this idea resonates so deeply with me since I also spent my childhood (and now my adulthood, come to think of it) living in places where I was not from.  Being not from anywhere has its advantages in breadth of experience and flexibility, but also it’s drawbacks.  I’ve always sort of envied people who were from someplace or had some obvious identity.  The stories in Unaccustomed Earth deal with the push and pull of identities and generations, but unlike the way Lahiri dealt with those themes in The Namesake, in Unaccustomed Earth she never really develops them fully.

The first stories in the book disappointed me because I enjoyed Lahiri’s gorgeous style but felt like she didn’t develop some of her characters and images as strongly as she’s capable of doing.  Several of the components were so strong that they should have leapt out of the book with tension and feeling, but I felt like Lahiri dropped them in passing instead. 

By contrast, the last section of the book is a novella that I found much more engaging and well done, and I really wish she had just taken that piece and made a novel out of it.  If you pick up this book and don’t have a lot of time on your hands I think you could skip part one entirely and just read part two about Hema and Kaushik. 

But really, if you don’t have much time but still want to get a taste of what a fabulous writer Lahiri is, you should read The Namesake instead. 

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Posted in , | Leave a response

Next »