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Summary: Great book for book club discussion
Review: I finished this book at 12:30 in the morning on January 2, and can think of no finer way to ease out of one year and greet the next. It's a brave and tender page turner and I could not put it down.
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Summary: A gem.
Review: I finished this book at 12:30 in the morning on January 2, and can think of no finer way to ease out of one year and greet the next. It's a brave and tender page turner and I could not put it down.
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Summary: A journey well taken
Review: I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a literary journey. Joyce Thompson is a master wordsmith. Each one of the 55 sections could stand alone. Each section has its own flavor that when combined with the whole makes for a delicious read.
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Summary: Great book for book club discussion
Review: My book club read this book and we had the one of our most lively and interesting discussions. Joyce Thompson's candid story of dealing with her mother's mental decline and her family's history was both moving and funny. Thompson is a great storyteller. I didn't want the book to end. I wanted more details and more stories about her mother and father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, her children and husband. They all seemed to come alive as she tries to make sense of half told family lore. Thompson's neither sanctimonious nor condescending when she writes about the difficult journey she made with her mother. It's a great read.
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Summary: An Honest Look at Spirituality and Alzheimer's
Review: Sailing is a fairly rare thing: an honest book about living a spiritual life. It talks about how one writer entered Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion, without losing her skeptical eye, integrating a 21st-century woman's rationalism with a willingness to believe. Not many books show someone actually doing the work of embracing a personal spirituality--doubting, moving one step forward and two steps back, but moving. This is one of those books.Sailing is also about remaking the mother-daughter bond, caring for a mother losing her short-term memory as she moves toward death. By now, you may be saying, "I get it. The woman found God, and God helped her deal with Mom." But spirituality didn't always help. Thompson's mother tried as hard as she could to push her daughter away, and Alzheimer's isn't pretty--one of Thompson's most rousing successes comes when she finally gives Stinky Mom a shower, a production that should make you laugh if you're not dead. Facing your mother's old age takes a sense of humor. Looking back on her ancestors, as Santeria practitioners do, Thompson tells of the family that formed her mother, and braids in her love story with her husband. Thompson as a novelist has always been a superb stylist, and the voice as much as the story kept me reading through the night. When you marry her voice to this true and unusual tale, you get a book I can't recommend highly enough.
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Summary: Sailing Toward Self-Discovery
Review: Sailing My Shoe to Timbuktu is one of the most touching and original works you're ever going to read. Part memoir by a well-educated urban woman, part spirit quest by the same sensitive soul, the book delves into difficult questions-the meaning of life, family, spirit-on the wings of clear, funny, sad, honest histories of herself and her family. The author's spiritual quest is decidedly non-traditional. Her skeptical though inquiring mind meanders toward belief in the life of the spirit as much because of the incongruous things that happen along the rough bumps of earthly life as by any religious philosophy or speculation. Sailing My Shoe is named for a game the author used to play with her uncle. As a child she would sail sticks, leaves-ultimately her tennis shoe-down a creek in search of far-off lands. In much the same way, the book sets off down the creek of memory in search of who this woman really is. To a reader who is the same age as her and who has had a similar experience with an aging parent, her accounts of dealing with her mother's last years are the most affecting. She does not gloss over the difficulty, nor is she too suave to celebrate the rare but brilliant sparks of love that occur with a mother who battles her frailties and sometimes her daughter with equal determination. One reads the "mother passages" wincing and laughing. The book flows through a lot of life's terrain, the rough as well as the smooth. Written with the delicate touch of a Japanese watercolor, Sailing My Shoe throughout is as joyful as a ride down a mountain cascade.
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Summary: Something For Everyone?
Review: This is a difficult book to catagorize. Do you wish the enjoyment of graceful prose by an author at the top of her game? Would you follow the highlights of a life story as memory works, with short chapters based on recurring themes but no straightforward timeline--interweaving people, events, family history, spiritual quest, finding a soul mate in middle age and making it work, raising children alone? There are poems written from the point of view of the author's aging mother (and they are good poems, a poet's poems, not the usual chopped prose of a fiction writer). There is humor in situations which were extremely difficult to live through. There is joy in introspection. There is personal growth after the achievement of success as a writer, sought after by movie producers. One might give this book to a friend for inspiration. One might accept the gently proffered challenges to try a different approach to attaining goals in life, and even rethink which goals really matter. Something for everyone? Perhaps.
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Summary: This book is a gift.
Review: This wonderful book overtook my life for 3 days as I savored each short, wise chapter. I was sorry when I reached the last page. A book about love, death, spirit, it is equally a funny down-to-earth account of a woman's everyday struggles with career, family and what to wear. Here's the bonus...Thompson's wordcraft is masterful. Her lovely meditation on the simple dance of a falling leaf is as lyrical as the passages about her working days at Microsoft are richly drawn. If you have an aged, impaired parent, you will find in Thompson a wise and witty guide on how to maneuver the tough, too-real moments. There is heartbreak here but also a sense of honor in helping a loved one transition into death. The vignette when she steals away from her abusive husband with her young children is told mostly though dialogue between her and her unsuspecting 6 year old daughter. A lovely and harrowing account where the mother protects the child but never quite tells a lie. Thompson's memoir challenges readers to find their own stories. The real treasure is her writing, an astonishing gift. If you're a fan of words, welcome to your new favorite writer, Joyce Thompson.
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