Hosted @ Socrates’ Book Reviews

Love, Clancy: A dog’s Letters Home by Richard Glover

Age: Three Months
c/-The New Kennel
Chateau Chaos
28 November

Dear Mum and Dad,
It’s Clancy here, your puppy, writing from my new home in the city. The people I’ve moved in with seem friendly but a little strange. They’re particularly weird whenever I urinate. Either they run around grabbing rolls of paper towel, in a scene of some hysteria, saying, ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ or the stand smiling and saying, ‘Good dog, good dog.’

The first version happens inside, after I’ve urinated on the kitchen floor; the other outside, after I’ve urinated on the grass. I’m not sure what they are trying to convey. The only certain thing is that the “Oh no! Oh no!’ version is much more fun for me to watch, so it’s the reaction I go out of my way to generate.

The Best Life Stories: 150 Real-life Tales of Resilience, Joy, and Hope-

all 150 Words or Less!

Let Him Go, Olivia

Alejandro Arbide, San Antonio, Texas

There I was. Upside down inside the swimming pool. Drowned. My parents were screaming. It must have been the summer of  ’63. It was a gloomy day. Every Sunday we went to my grandparents’ house. My cousins and I were playing alongside the pool. I must have slipped. At three years old, I did not know how to swim. My mother was giving me CPR. More than twenty or twenty-five minutes had gone by. The ambulance had arrived. Everybody was staring at my mother. “Let him go, Olivia. It’s over.” Even my father had some feelings of resignation. Yet, she never gave up.

I write this story as a tribute to my mother, who, only four years later, passed away. And also in recognition of the editors who made it possible for my mother to have read in Reader’s Digest the miracle made by another woman utilizing then recently discovered CPR.

Neighbors by Danielle Steel

Chapter 1
The massive stone mansion was hot even in the basement as Debbie Speck bustled around the large efficient kitchen putting away the groceries that her husband Jack had just brought in. He was perspiring profusely. He was forty-four years old, somewhat overweight with balding dark hair and always reeked of aftershave that covered the faintly boozy smell of the cheap scotch he kept in his room and drank at night. It came through his pores the next day, when he exerted himself. Debbie usually joined him with a drink or two at night. She preferred gin and tonic or vodka she kept in the freezer in the basement apartment where their employer, Meredith White, never ventured. She respected their privacy which was ideal for them. Debbie was also heavy and dyed her hair blond herself.

Floating Twigs by Charles Tabb

FIRST CHAPTER:
I had known the day would come when circumstances forced my return to Denton, Florida, where I grew up. My parents had died before I finished high school, but another funeral brought me here now.

The Denton of my childhood reminded me of an old man, settled and unchanging. However, on that sunny day back in 1990 as I drove across the bridge that spanned the inlet between Denton Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, I looked over the expance of emerald-green water to the harbor that lay protected by Sugar Isle, a long barrier island of sugar-white sand. Instead of a harbor filled with fishing boats lazily dotting the landscape, a waterfront teeming with jet-skis and noise greeted me. New boat dogs grew and twisted out of the adjoining land like cancerous groths. Beside the more expensive boats that had invaded the harbor, the older fishing oalts looked like improverished cousins. Seventeen years had scarred the town.

TEASER: 
The next day I spent time with Bones, sneaking leftovers out to him from the kitchen and letting him get to know me. I ended up giving him bread and some gravy that had been in the refrigerator for a few days, along with some baloney and stale rice. It wasn’t much of a meal, but he ate it the way he had everything else – in huge gulps.

Hosted by Yvonne 
It’s Tuesday! It’s time to share your excerpts and teasers from books we are currently reading, have read or are planning to read. So, feel free to join us by sharing the first paragraph or (a few) of a book you are reading or thinking about reading soon. This meme is guaranteed to increase your TBR

How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior

1
Veronica

The Ballahays
Ayrshire, Scotland
May 2012

I have told Eileen to get rid of all the mirrors. I used to like them, but I certainly don’t now. Mirrors are too honest. There is only so much truth a woman can take.