A book review
Dorcas Smucker's blog, Life in the Shoe, is one of my favorites, so when she offered the chance to review her latest book, Ordinary Days: Family Life in a Farmhouse, I was delighted to do so. I received the book last week, and immediately sat down to enjoy it, expecting the same delightful humor and insights into life she offers on her blog. I was not disappointed. I laughed out loud at a few chapters, and as I tend to do with something really funny, I took the book along with me when I went to my family's home over the weekend and read a chapter aloud to the family.
I think that was a mistake. Daddy swiped the book when I wasn't looking. As soon as he laid it down, my sister Susie picked it up. Irina, my visiting pregnant-and-sick sister from Virginia insisted the book was an excellent distraction from her continuing nausea and trumped the rest of us with, “Well, if I can't have it, I might throw up.” I returned home last night, but the book stayed.
Ordinary Days: Family Life in a Farmhouse is a collection of essays about Ms. Smucker's life, on growing up Amish, and being a Mennonite preacher's wife and a mother to six children. Each chapter in this book can stand on its own as a story, so I am reading this book randomly, rather than in my normal perfectionist straight-through-from-beginning-to-end method, partly because other people keep swiping my book, but also partly because I always read so fast that a good book ends far too soon, so with this method I'm hoping to discover a story on the third time through that I may have missed on the first reading.
My Dad always says, “A real writer is someone who can write about an ordinary life and make people want to read it.” Ms. Smucker is definitely a “real writer.”
Ordinary Days: Family Life in a Farmhouse is available at Amazon.com. The author's blog is www.dorcassmucker.blogspot.com.
Edited to correct information.
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2 comments:
You are very kind--thanks so much.
I'm so glad the sick sister trumped all.
A tiny correction: the two books on Amazon are actually my self-published original and a slightly-revised newer edition of the same book. My 'real' second book is coming out in August.
Blessings to you.
Last night I awoke at 3am and decided to continue reading the book that a friend had just given me. I made it all the way to the end of the book before I felt like I could make another attempt at sleeping. Imagine my surprise when I decided to visit your blog this afternoon(after finding it under your "interests" on xanga) and there was your review of the exact book I had just been reading! I dearly loved it. I used to live in Corvallis, OR, which is about 10 miles from Albany and Harrisburg, and so I am very familiar with all the places that Dorcas wrote about. It made it all that much more enjoyable!
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