"The Girls From Ames"

The rest of the story...

Well I have to say this book has been kicking my butt, we have been reading since May and finally last night I finished it! It's definitely not what I expected and pretty choppy and hard to follow at times, but in the books defense that could of been my fault since I was reading 2 other books with it.

This story, after reading the entire book was reflecting back on the twenty-some years that these 11 friends have come together and stayed together through thick and thin. They have had death, disease, losing husbands and children and so much more, and in the end they had each other whether it was an email or a hug from the closest Ames Sister they could find.

I know in my life I have had a lot of friends who have helped me through a lot of times, and I have kept the same Best Friend since we were 13 years old and we have our moments, and sometimes we don't talk for days or weeks but when we get back together it's like we have never been apart. That's what this story is about, the true friendship that women need to feel complete, someone who is always there for them through the good and the bad. Now I am not saying my loving husband isn't my best friend in other ways, but not in the way that both Terri and I have been through it all, and we continue to grow as time goes and when I am old and cranky she will be there to push my wheel chair or vice versa.

I hope in your lifetime, like the Ames Girls and my best friend you too find someone as special as that.

Until next time.......

"The Girls From Ames"

Part 1: Chapters 1-5

This is the story of eleven girls that lived in a place called Ames, each has their own unique story and unique way of ending up as an "Ames Girl". It was a clique but not one they intended but of course everyone saw them that way. The story begins, with the girls getting together for their annual reunion of once a year they all come together at someone's house for a weekend, even though some miss their families it's a time for them to renew the friendships that have fizzed out over the year.

This first part focuses on Marilyn, Karla, Kelly and Shelia who even though Kelly and Karla had some bad blood they somehow come together to bunk together at these events and in a way ground each other. One being very motherly and out of place without her kids, while the other is trying to get back the 20 years of her life spent married and unhappy. Even though their lives are so different they need each other to balance themselves out, and both to find a way to continue the connection that could very easily been lost between friends over the years. Many of the girls see Karla as a whiner and Kelly as to much of a partier but they need different personality to make the group go round.

Marilyn was the one that spreads the pictures out and kept the scrapbooks of all the thinks the girls had done over the years. She continually takes pictures and keeps notes to never forget who they were, are and will become. Marilyn's father was a confident to many of the girls and to the community, only wanting the best for everyone. She always had a looming thing that she was born because of her brother's death that the family never really got over, but yet moved on...if that makes sense....She respected her Father and tried to abide by his rules and when she messed up, she was more disappointed in herself than her father ever could be which is why he normally didn't punish her. I like to think of Marilyn as the glue of the group because by taking pictures and old letters, it kept them all weaved together in a sense to show why they are and always will be friends.

Finally, Shelia suddenly died at the age of 22 a very mysterious death. She lived life and and with her Father dying at the age of 47 it hit her family hard, but her Mother kept things in line as her Father would of wanted her too. Shelia went off to college and met a man they called Bud Man, and was out drinking when somehow she fell but no one really knows if she was pushed and being the second tragedy in Mrs. Walsh's family, she didn't push it As many as the Ames girls who could afforded to come to her funeral did, but the 5 that didn't never felt closure and started questioning how she really died, only Mrs. Walsh didn't want to pry as it was over and she didn't want to open old wounds so the mystery still continues as no one really knows how Shelia dies, and the group went from 11 to 10, but Shelia will never be forgotten.

To me this a great story about friends who no matter how far or close they are, they always keep in touch. I have always said if you can meet one person who is a true friend then your life is complete. I have been Best Friends with Terri since we were 13, and even though we don't always agree or don't call everyday no matter what like the bond of the Ames girls she is one person that I'll have in my life for the rest of my life. That to me is more important than anything, someone who has seen you at your worst and best, and no matter what will do anything for you that's what true friendship is and that is what these 11 Girls always have had and always will.

Until our next section...

Happy Reading!!

Kel

The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship

For our next book...


From the coauthor of the million-copy bestseller The Last Lecture comes a moving tribute to female friendships, with the inspiring story of eleven girls and the ten women they became.

Meet the Ames Girls: eleven childhood friends who formed a special bond growing up in Ames, Iowa. As young women, they moved to eight different states, yet managed to maintain an enduring friendship that would carry them through college and careers, marriage and motherhood, dating and divorce, a child’s illness and the mysterious death of one member of their group. Capturing their remarkable story, The Girls from Ames is a testament to the deep bonds of women as they experience life’s joys and challenges -- and the power of friendship to triumph over heartbreak and unexpected tragedy.

The girls, now in their forties, have a lifetime of memories in common, some evocative of their generation and some that will resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. Photograph by photograph, recollection by recollection, occasionally with tears and often with great laughter, their sweeping and moving story is shared by Jeffrey Zaslow, Wall Street Journal columnist, as he attempts to define the matchless bonds of female friendship. It demonstrates how close female relationships can shape every aspect of women’s lives – their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their need for validation, their relationships with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters – and reveals how such friendships thrive, rewarding those who have committed to them.

The Girls from Ames is the story of a group of ordinary women who built an extraordinary friendship. With both universal insights and deeply personal moments, it is a book that every woman will relate to and be inspired by.

About the Author
Jeffrey Zaslow is a Wall Street Journal columnist and coauthor, with Randy Pausch, of The Last Lecture, the #1 New York Times bestseller now translated into 41 languages. Zaslow attended Dr. Pausch’s famous lecture and wrote the story that sparked worldwide interest in it. The Girls From Ames also grew out of one of Zaslow’s columns

The Five People You Meet In Heaven

First off I would like to apologize to our readers. My book reviews are not as eloquent as Kelli's. We really need to urge her to write her own book!

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is an quick and easy read that makes you think about your own life while reading it. It is about the simple things that make your life what it is. Things that you would not normally even think about or the people that you meet in passing that truly touch your life or you touch theirs.

It is an interpretation of how heaven looks like through the eyes of the main character, Eddie. On the basis of five different encounters, Eddie learns the lessons of life, sacrifice, anger, love and forgiveness. The book begins with the end. After detailing the last moments of Eddie's death, the author then explains how heaven looks like through Eddie's conversations with five people he knew in life: the Blue Man, Captain, Ruby (and his father), Marguerite (who is his wife) and a little girl by the name of Tala. From each of these characters, Eddie learned something in his death what he could not have understood in life.

It is a story of closure and a story of purpose, of making sense out of the twists and injustices of life and of finding meaning in the small interactions that happen every day.

I hope that you all take a moment to read this book, it will truly change the way that you perceive your everyday lives.

Until our next read...

Adriane

Our next Book.......

"The Five People You Meet in Heaven"

I choose this book as a recommendation from a friend, so here it is our next big pick!!!

Amazon.com Review:

Part melodrama and part parable, Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven weaves together three stories, all told about the same man: 83-year-old Eddie, the head maintenance person at Ruby Point Amusement Park. As the novel opens, readers are told that Eddie, unsuspecting, is only minutes away from death as he goes about his typical business at the park. Albom then traces Eddie's world through his tragic final moments, his funeral, and the ensuing days as friends clean out his apartment and adjust to life without him. In alternating sections, Albom flashes back to Eddie's birthdays, telling his life story as a kind of progress report over candles and cake each year. And in the third and last thread of the novel, Albom follows Eddie into heaven where the maintenance man sequentially encounters five pivotal figures from his life (a la A Christmas Carol). Each person has been waiting for him in heaven, and, as Albom reveals, each life (and death) was woven into Eddie's own in ways he never suspected. Each soul has a story to tell, a secret to reveal, and a lesson to share. Through them Eddie understands the meaning of his own life even as his arrival brings closure to theirs. Albom takes a big risk with the novel; such a story can easily veer into the saccharine and preachy, and this one does in moments. But, for the most part, Albom's telling remains poignant and is occasionally profound. Even with its flaws, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a small, pure, and simple book that will find good company on a shelf next to It's A Wonderful Life. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly:

"At the time of his death, Eddie was an old man with a barrel chest and a torso as squat as a soup can," writes Albom, author of the bestselling phenomenon Tuesdays with Morrie, in a brief first novel that is going to make a huge impact on many hearts and minds. Wearing a work shirt with a patch on the chest that reads "Eddie" over "Maintenance," limping around with a cane thanks to an old war injury, Eddie was the kind of guy everybody, including Eddie himself, tended to write off as one of life's minor characters, a gruff bit of background color. He spent most of his life maintaining the rides at Ruby Pier, a seaside amusement park, greasing tracks and tightening bolts and listening for strange sounds, "keeping them safe." The children who visited the pier were drawn to Eddie "like cold hands to a fire." Yet Eddie believed that he lived a "nothing" life-gone nowhere he "wasn't shipped to with a rifle," doing work that "required no more brains than washing a dish." On his 83rd birthday, however, Eddie dies trying to save a little girl. He wakes up in heaven, where a succession of five people are waiting to show him the true meaning and value of his life. One by one, these mostly unexpected characters remind him that we all live in a vast web of interconnection with other lives; that all our stories overlap; that acts of sacrifice seemingly small or fruitless do affect others; and that loyalty and love matter to a degree we can never fathom. Simply told, sentimental and profoundly true, this is a contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership. Bringing into the spotlight the anonymous Eddies of the world, the men and women who get lost in our cultural obsession with fame and fortune, this slim tale, like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, reminds us of what really matters here on earth, of what our lives are given to us for.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Happy Reading!

"The Shack"

Chapters 4-18

I have to say this book was a great read and really starts to make you think.

As you can imagine Mack does go to the Shack, the place where his daughter was murdered and finds something he could not of imagined in a million years. His friend lets him borrow his Jeep and he gets his hiking gear together as well as a gun, he is hoping he doesn't have to use. But to his surprise when he gets there, it is still the same place he had found almost 4 years ago but then something happens...he falls and hits his head and the world around him changes right before his eyes. And everything he thought of God and Jesus are somewhat a totally different then what he was told and believed. There were 3 of them, God himself, Sanjua and Jesus all working together but yet three separate people or "spirits" that had a plan for Mack.

My first reaction was that they were there to lead him home to be with Missy, and then it was maybe she is still alive and they will lead him to her but neither were true. They each had a purpose to show him the light and that even though he was a believer, they wanted to show him he had to truly forgive before he could heal and that the damage from not forgiving was hurting his older daughter Kate, who thought Missy's disappearance was her fault. They allowed him to make peace with his Father who he had so many hard feelings for, for so many years and Mack's heart was finally finding some peace but now it was on to the biggest challenge of all....trying to find forgiveness for the worst possible thing that could of happened, the death of his youngest child by a child murderer.

It was amazing to me that after all that Jesus, God and Sanjua taught him he finally got it and realized that by not forgiving, he was only leaving his heart unopened and his daughter to suffer also. So as you can imagine he did find that forgiveness and in return they showed him where to find his daughters body.

As with any good book there is always a twist, and in this one I never saw this coming but he finally "woke" up in a sense and started home to tell his family of what had just happened, but as luck would have it he was in a serious car accident with a drunk driver who ran the light. As it was happening I was thinking how can this be it, they just took him back to have him help his family find forgiveness and now he's gone? But of course that was not the case.

He was taken to the hospital and my a miracle he was alive and ready to explain his story but at first it was blurry and he wasn't sure it happened until his wife Nan was at his side and it started all coming back, so he finally got to his wife and kids, especially Kate who finally admitted she felt it was her fault but now Mack truly lost it and explained it was never her fault, it was all God's Plan.

After he was released from the hospital, they went back to the "Shack" to try to find Missy. Of course it was almost to much for the family when they went back but with Mack's directions her body was found and enough evidence was there to find the killer, and also allow the other four families to find their loved one's bodies.

I guess what learned from this story is that without truly forgiving someone your heart will be closed, and without an totally open heart you are not letting God in 100%. It also showed me that even the bad things that happen and it seems like it's not fair, it's God's Plan and World not ours. We have to take each moment and realize it could be our last, love our families and hold onto the one's that mean the most to us. Plus the perception of God isn't always as what we take it to be, and have to be open to new ideas and know that one day those that we love that have gone, we'll all be together again for all eternity.

Until next time.........

Happy Reading!

"The Shack"

Part 1: Chapters 1-4

I told Adriane last night that I guess even though I posted the synopsis, I didn't really read what the book was about. Or I did and it didn't even comprehend what it was because as I kept reading, I never saw what happened coming! This has been an easy read, one that I didn't want to stop reading but because I am a faithful book club member, did...but it was hard not to move on!

Anyways, with that said the story begins with Mack taking his family on a vacation to the outdoors without his wife, Nan as she has to work. So he takes his 3 kids, 2 girls and a boy and they camp for the week, and they are having a fantastic time. Meet new friends and Mack has what I see as a revelation with God as he prays that his life is so good. His kids have found friends, he has met people that are really good people and they all are really enjoying themselves. Until the last day when the two older ones want to take the canoe out, just one last time and something goes wrong...the canoe tips and he has to leave his younger daughter in the campsite coloring while he uses his old lifeguard skills to save his older son and daughter from drowning. In the meantime after things relax, and everyone is OK he goes back to the campsite to find his daughter Missy, missing. Thinking she just wondered off with her new friends or went to the bathrooms panic sets in but he is still in the mindset of finding his daughter. Then the reality starts to set in as she is nowhere to be found and her friend is found at the showers without her. They continue their search and get the Park Ranger, and Police involved.

They split up and start searching, start talking to other campers until they find someone who saw Missy or someone who resembled her in a green truck, the person pushed her down and now they know that she has been kidnapped. With this new knowledge they go back to the campsite to find her shoe, and a lady bug stickpin with five dots on it. Now with a kidnapping of a child the FBI get involved. Unfortunately the FBI has no good news, this is the MO of a serial killer that has been out of the news. He stalks for children who are left unattended and then he kills them, but they never find the bodies or any evidence and other than the serial number on the lady bug that is left as well as now there were 5 dots which means that this is his fifth body.

Nan comes down to the site and finds Mack not only physically exhausted, but mentally and to my surprise is that he oddly calm and collective. So the search expands, they find evidence of the truck and come to a shack which the FBI and Police go into first, what they find is that of a pool of blood of the little girl who unfortunately is thought for dead, and once again no evidence other than hers. It sad to see, a Father have to go through such a horrendous ordeal and a family be torn apart by a monster. This is where the story begins, a family planning a memorial and almost 4 years later getting a letter from Papa or God as we all know him, but he is not sure if it's for real or if someone is toying with his emotions but it's something that he has to find out for himself....and the story continues, will he go by himself or have the police look into it??

So many questions, and now you can see why it was so hard to stop at that particular spot!

Until our next stop....

Happy Reading!