Friday Finds

One Perfect Day - Lauraine Snelling - Saw this book at projecta.blogspot - Two mothers end up more closely connected that they could dream...and yet they are strangers to one another.The first has two children--twins, a boy and girl, who are seniors in high school. She wants their last Christmas as a family living in the same home to be perfect, but her husband is delayed returning from a business trip abroad. And then there's an accident--a fatal one involving a drunk driver.Meanwhile, the other mother has a daughter who needs a new heart, and so the loss of one woman becomes the miracle the other has desperately prayed for. While one mother grieves, and pulls away from her family, the other finds that even miracles aren't always easy to receive.

Ireland - Frank Delany - Saw this at thingsmeanalot.blogspot - Ireland, 1951. A wandering storyteller arrives at a country house and asks for lodgings for the night. In exchange for a bed and a meal, he tells a story – a riveting tale about how Ireland came to be. Among his listeners is Ronan O’Mara, aged nine. Ronan becomes fascinated with the storyteller, and he listens to him night after night. When, at the urging of his devout mother, the old man is asked to leave, Ronan is heartbroken. Somehow he can’t shake off the feeling that those stories were meant for him. And so he begins a quest to find the storyteller again.

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

House of Dance - Beth Kephart Rosie and her mother coexist in the same house as near strangers. Since Rosie's father abandoned them years ago, her mother has accomplished her own disappearing act, spending more time with her boss than with Rosie. Now faced with losing her grandfather too, Rosie begins to visit him everyday, traveling across town to his house, where she helps him place the things that matter most to him "In Trust." As Rosie learns her grandfather's story, she discovers the role music and motion have played in it. But like colors, memories fade. When Rosie stumbles into the House of Dance, she finally finds a way to restore the source of her grandfather's greatest joy.