Gina's Friday Finds | October 9, 2020

Gina’s Friday Finds | October 9, 2020

Welcome back to the Friday Finds, where you will find timely book recommendations, delicious recipes, and a creative project or two. If you are a newsletter subscriber and read to the bottom of the email, you received news of a special drawing. Cricket was the winner! Now on to The Finds for this week.

Happy Fall!

Gina

ps. Look for a few updates to my resource pages this week. Prime Days on Amazon is soon and I’m receiving affiliate alerts for advance deals. I’ll try to pass on some of the best ones.

Gina’s Friday Finds | October 9, 2020 – Books

Letters from a Nameless Village by Muhn Sihn

After failure in ambition and in love, a man leaves the city and settles in a nameless village, where he finds peace and meaning among its simple inhabitants. He writes a series of letters to an old friend detailing his experience, but there are flickers of madness and doubt upon the pages, leaving one to wonder the truth behind his letters.

Clifton Chase and the Arrow of Light by Jaimie M. Engle

Clifton Chase was an ordinary boy.

There were plenty of other middle schoolers it could’ve chosen. Six-hundred and eighty-six, if you didn’t count Clifton. The Arrow of Light appeared in his closet then whisked him away to a far-off land, where a dwarf and magical bird led him to two princes. He returned their arrow that he had somehow found and went home to his normal life. But the Arrow of Light had other plans. When Clifton found out that the king locked the princes in Drofflic Tower, he knew he must return to the past to protect the future. Enlisting the help of many mythical creatures and the princes’ own sister, he managed to find the reason the Arrow of Light chose him. But magic can be wrong. And history longs to be told.

Winner of the 2015 BRAG Medallion
Top 10 Pick Kid Lit Reviews 2014
Just Read! Florida, Florida Department of Education Summer Reading List 2017

Leaky Faucets by Jacob Lasher

Fear of love, fear of goodbyes, fear of life…Enter the mind of someone struggling with anxiety and how it can affect relationships including the one with oneself. Poems of love and loss, Leaky Faucets expresses the vulnerability of mental illness and accepting love, but most importantly, loving yourself. Poetry

Miss Nude Canada’s Shoes and other stories by Jeff Pearson

2020 Readers’ Favorite Bronze Award Winner for Non-Fiction Humour

Sooner or later, everyone comes face to face with a fiasco–even the innocent, angelic types like Miss Nude Canada circa 1986. Generally speaking, fiascos, which thankfully come in many different forms, are events where the caca hits the fan; there’s failure, breakdown, or catastrophe of some sort and everything just slithers off of the rails in a sickening, sideways fashion. Human idiocy, in all of its glorious manifestations, is often the fiasco’s prime catalyst with ego-squashing humiliation its necessary outcome. Fiasco-prone humans with an above-average surplus of caca-splattered fan-blades in their closets have many (sordid) tales to tell. Mr. Pearson, the floor is all yours ….

Strap yourself in tightly for a compelling and entertaining, emotional and geographical roller coaster ride of epic proportions as Mr. Pearson makes his way rather randomly through the labyrinth of young adulthood and beyond. With cheeky wit and a swashbuckler’s flourish with the language, the devil is alive and thriving in the details as candid confessions of either maximum intoxication levels or a cyclic battle with upper-chamber malfunctions, and the resulting adventures, some immensely comical and others deeply poignant or troubling, leave one reeling with disbelief. Many of the author’s stories are just plain, freaking crazy, setting up the reader wanting for the madness to never end. And the others will leave you stunned and bruised–or rubbing away tears with a finger. So step right up, gather your courage and try on Miss Nude Canada’s Shoes (And Other Fiascos). Yes, they will be soaked in beer–but a prediction: you’ll be so impressed as to how well they fit that you’ll never want to take them off!