BOOKISH FRIDAYS: “DREAM OF THE BLUE ROOM”

Welcome to another Bookish Friday, in which I  share excerpts from books…and connect with other bloggers, who do the same.

Let’s begin the celebration by sharing Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and let’s showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What better way to spend a Friday!

Today’s featured book is one I purchased a while ago, in September 2014; the author, however, is one I’ve enjoyed with several more recent books.  Dream of the Blue Room, by Michelle Richmond, depicts the powerful intimacies of marriage, friendship, and family that shape our paths and the bonds of home that buoy us—wherever home may be.

 

 

 

Beginning:  In the dream Amanda Ruth is not dead, she is only sleeping.  We are lying under a sycamore tree beside a rugged mountain path.  The grass around us is littered with the pits of fruits we have eaten:  peaches and figs, plums and nectarines.  Her fingers are still wet from our feast.

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56:  As I lay on top of Amanda Ruth, I felt a nervousness rattling in my stomach, and along with it a feeling of being in exactly the right place and with the right person, a wholeness I had not felt since we’d last been together.  Her body felt as familiar as my own, although she had changed since that day in the boathouse, gained a softness and a stillness that wasn’t there before.

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Blurb:  Jenny and Amanda Ruth were best friends in a small Alabama town until eighteen-years-old Amanda Ruth was murdered. Now, fourteen years later, Jenny has traveled with her husband to China to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes and finally fulfill her friend’s dream of visiting her Chinese father’s homeland. It’s also, Jenny hopes, an opportunity to repair her own troubled marriage. But as she journeys through a foreign landscape, the guilty secrets of Jenny’s past rise up and her life will be inexorably altered.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog (“Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard” —Library Journal, starred review) and No One You Know (“Luminous . . . will keep you thinking long after the last page has been turned”—Family Circle),

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It has been a while since I last read a novel by Richmond, but I was drawn to this one because of how much I’ve enjoyed her other books.  What do you think?  Would you keep reading?

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