sue monk kidd

just read the most of the book The Mermaid's Chair by the above author...it's always a gain when you can get a book like that for under a buck at the thrift shop. it's rare that i find a book that interests me enough to buy it nowadays (having bought hundreds of books over the years that looked ever-so-interesting but never quite get read). Perhaps i've finally moved out of the 19th-century need for a large library, distancing the clamor of my book-piling forebears. However, if i had a room lined with bookshelves, i'd eagerly fill them all!
Kidd has a wonderful gift for detail, for painting with such color and light that you are brought into a place you have perhaps not been but now seems so familiar that you could swear perhaps you had been there, once...perhaps in a dream, but you'd been there.

More than that, the concepts expressed are solid: losing what matters to gain something else that matters (no matter what it seems at the moment), discovering that even in the worst of circumstances there is healing, blessing, often unlooked-for and certainly undeserved.
And ultimately, the idea that it is the truth which sets us free, no matter how weird, how painful it may be. (Jesus is right again--are we surprised?!)
I loved The Secret Life of Bees as well--again, taking us on a lunatic and yet completely understandable journey through impossible territory. great images. Not unlike some of the stories i could tell about being a midwife in the same part of the world, in a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth...