Book Blurb: rush home road

rush home road
A novel
By Lori Lansens

When 5-year old Sharla Cody is dumped on the doorstep of Addy Shadd, a 70-year old woman living in a trailer park, Addy does not know how completely her life is about to change. She's hardly used to company and the troubled Sharla is not the sweet, beautiful angel she had envisioned. Over time, Addy and Sharla form a bond that neither of them expected-and Sharla begins to undergo a transformation under Addy's patient and loving care. But much to Addy's surprise and dismay, Sharla's presence brings back memories of her own tumultuous childhood. As she reminisces about her days growing up in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves in the mid 1800s, she remembers her family and her first love and confronts the painful experience that drove her away from home, never to return.
Brilliantly structured and achingly lyrical, this beautiful first novel by the award-winning author of The Girls tells the story of two unlikely people thrown together who transform each other's lives forever.

I got lost for two hours while previewing this book for this post. Lost in the story, dipping in here and there and finally succumbing to reading the the entire first chapter and then the author interview and discussion questions in the reader's guide in the back of the book. The reader's guide is also available at the Hachette site. And I also read the brief excerpt of Lansens' second novel, The Girls, tucked into the very back of the book and based on that headed straight to our library's online catalog to see if we have it. Not only do we have it, but we have it also in large print which was the deciding factor for ordering it immediately even though I've already got more than enough books checked out with nearly as many ordered. Finding a large print copy of something I'm eager to read right now is a huge bonus because I've been having significant eye-strain issues for the past week or two.

I'm so tempted to set everything else aside and devote the next several days to this story. I could even consider it prep work for the NaNo novel project I described in yesterday's post since this story is set in a trailer park in a rural community--though in Ontario, Canada it seems little different in atmosphere from the one I live in here in Oregon, USA.

As announced in this post, this is the eleventh of twelve Book Blurbs I plan to do for the review copies I received from Hachette books in August. There will also be more substantial book reviews for each of them as either Ed or I read them.