Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings

    

It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Today I'm featuring an upcoming read, Willa's Grove by Laura Munson. The excerpts shared are from a hardcover version borrowed from the library.

Beginning: The Women

On a typical day in their typical lives, three women went to their mailboxes and found--amid junk mail and bills and shiny flyers for unshiny things--an invitation, sealed with a bold W pressed into sage-green wax.

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Page 56:  Jane crossed her arms even tighter. "I honestly don't know. I was lying in bed last night with my suitcase all packed, dreaming up all the reasons why I didn't want to come. Thinking that the So Now What question doesn't have to be that hard to answer..."

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My thoughts:  I find this novel's plot very intriguing--the question of what to do when you reach a crossroads in life, and coming together with friends to think it through.

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From GoodReads:  Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they'd be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully curated futures have turned out to be dead ends.

The sender of the invitation is Willa Silvester, who is reeling from the untimely death of her beloved husband and the reality that she must say goodbye to the small mountain town they founded together. Yet as Willa mourns her losses, an impossible question keeps staring her in the face: So now what?

Struggling to find the answer alone, fiercely independent Willa eventually calls a childhood friend who happens to be in her own world of hurt--and that's where the idea sparks. They decide to host a weeklong interlude from life, and invite two other friends facing their own quandaries. Soon the four women converge at Willa's Montana homestead, a place where they can learn from nature and one another as they contemplate their second acts together in the rugged wilderness of big sky country. 

 

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