Three 60ish Sisters on an RV Road Trip in Yellowstone Park, One Finds a Lost Love

-


It’s very enjoyable to read a book like Grown Up Second Chance by Casey Dawes, involving people who’ve been around the horn, so to speak. I remember reading, a few decades ago, the demographics aspiring romance writers needed to heed in order to get their books published: main characters needed to be mid thirties, or not far from that age.  Thank goodness that’s changed. I always enjoyed Miss Marple mysteries by Agatha Christie, and that famous sleuth was no spring chicken. I’ve enjoyed Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, and love books, movies, and tv series with leading characters of all ages. 

My current library ebooks and audio books from various digital platforms number 15, and return dates figure prominently in my reading priority. After I had read the Kindle free sample of Grown Up Second Chance, I immediately bought that edition and continued reading it. I did stop long enough to finish Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, but after a long day of doing everything but reading, the book I most wanted to continue was Grown Up Second Chance. Once I started, I read until I couldn’t stay awake, and started it up again first thing Sunday morning, finishing it before 10am. There were so many things about the book I enjoyed. 

The storyline of the book involves three early retirement age sisters, one widowed, one divorced, and one never married, embarking on a one year cross country RV trip hitting some of the major National Parks. This book is largely set in Yellowstone, one of my favorites (although favorite usually applies to whichever of the National Parks I happen to be in at the moment). The sisters have planned their daily trip itineraries as well, but no one expected to encounter a first love near a campground dumpster in Yellowstone. (Another thing I like in books is serendipity.) I thoroughly enjoyed this story, the characters of the sisters and others, the dialogue, including humorous banter, descriptions of their park explorations, underlying issues of family dynamics and life choices in later years. This is the first book I’ve read by author Casey Dawes, but I would definitely read more in a similar vein. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spend a Year Walkng in Stanley Tucci’s Shoes

-
What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci is an interesting, light, humorous, and witty read for anyone interested in cooking, good food, restaurants, acting and actors, what Tucci’s daily business and family life is like, and what the heck is going on with his wife Felicity Blunt who Tucci portrays constantly throughout the book as potentially engaging in affairs, which I’m sure is just a humorous device of some kind. You couldn’t help noticing everytime he mentions where she’s off to, there is a tongue in cheek sarcastic suggestion that other men may be involved, throughout the entire book, yet they pair beautifully in the kitchen, and he makes the point, “Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.” Before this book I was reading Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, and struggling to get through which I didn’t expect as I’ve loved previous books he’d written. I found it very different from his books in the Thursday Murder Club series. Tucci’s book by comparison was a v...
Read more

The Wager is a Safe Bet As A Gripping Book About Life, Death, and Adventure on an 18th Century British Warship

-
The Wager by David Grann is the poster book for “Truth is stranger than fiction;” this  narrative nonfiction book is a story about a crew of men and boys with ages spanning from 80 years (a cook) to adolescence, who work on the British 18th century ship HMS Wager in 1741. They are sent on a secret Naval mission with a squadron of other ships to destroy any Spanish vessels along the way toward South America and the Pacific Ocean (they were at war with Spain), and also try to locate and commandeer a legendary Spanish treasure ship. Author David Grann had access to “archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the half-truthful journals, and the surviving records from the troubling court-martial”(Kindle book blurb). This book is like a runaway train I didn’t want to leave. It is gripping and not easily put down.  I posted several passages from this book on social media, prompting a friend to ask if it was similar to William Golding’s book Lord of the Fl...
Read more

A Plot to Capture the American Zeitgeist

-
Image
Amazon’s book blurb for The Everglades by Louis Berry says this about it, “…a chilling saga unfolds where the pristine wilderness of Florida’s Everglades masks a sinister legacy of evil. In 1945, two Nazi war criminals, General Reinhard Hochstuhl and Colonel Wilhelm Von Unterscheisse , infiltrate 1945 Miami via a covert U-boat landing, seeding a multi-generational plot to subvert American society.” Berry writes, “No one in Miami was aware of the German U-Boat five hundred yards offshore; south of Flamingo Point . The ship operated within rat-lines moving high-valued Nazis to safety across the globe…Orders were to assimilate. Approach was to erode each generation’s connection to God. Free of dogmatic German machinery, lies became subtle; directed at influencing beliefs Americans held dear. Eliminating God from the collective consciousness was best accomplished across generations. The men knew they must find wives sympathetic to the Fatherland’s cause of world dom...
Read more