The Eye Opener by Indrajit Garai

The Postman knocks on our door: a registered mail for me.

After waiting for seven months, the document from our notary office has arrived finally. I was leaving for work, but, I put my laptop down, take the deed to my desk, and start checking it page by page. Not that I’m expecting any error, but just in case. This apartment is important for many reasons.

“Is everything alright, Franck?”

I look up. Armelle is standing beside me, worried. I draw her closer and press my check against her bulging belly.

“Yes. Our son can arrive in peace now.”
 

Blakely
Redefining Family
Australian Shepherd – Ohio

Blakely is a four-legged lesson in compassion for those who are different. As a nursery companion dog raising orphaned infant animals into into well-adjusted adults at the Cincinnati Zoo, he has cared for cheetahs, ocelots, a wallaby, a bat-eared fox. a serval, a takin, and even a warthog.

Blakely’s babysitting services aren’t just helpful to the zookeepers; they can be life-saving for orphaned animals who are unable to learn survival skills from their mothers. “If an animal is snarling at another who hasn’t been taught to understand that it means back off, the can be killed,” explains Dawn Strasser, the Cincinnati Zoo’s head keeper. Blakely teaches the nursery-bound babies the social skills that they need to thrive, and he comforts then while they sleep.

Based on this intro, would you read more or pass on this book?

The Art of Hiding by Amanda Prowse

Nina caught the red light only a spit away from the entrance to the boys’ school. It was a regular frustration at the beginning of the day and something she tended to see as an omen.

Green light, good day. Red light, bad day.

Based on this intro, would you read more or pass on this book?

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder

Chapter One: The Squeeze Inn
On the foothill freeway, about an hour inland from Los Angeles, a mountain range looms ahead of northbound traffic, bringing suburbia to a sudden stop. This wilderness is the southern edge of the San Bernardino Mountains, a “tall, precipitous escarpment” in the words of the United States Geological Survey. It’s part of a formation that began growing eleven milion years ago along the San Andreas Fault and is still rising today, gaining a few millimeters each year as the Pacific and North American plates grind past each other. The peaks appear to grow much faster, howeveer, when you’re driving straight at them. They’re the kind of sight that makes you sit up straighter and starts a swelling sensation in your chest, a feeling like helium crowding your ribcage, enough perhaps to carry you away.

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Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.

A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day beginning.

But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing. A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings. The curve meant that he would fly slowly, and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until the ocean stood still beneath him. He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration, held his breath, forced one… single… more… inch… of… curve… Then his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell.

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Life After by Katie Ganshert

Sirens wailed.

A woman screamed.

Impossible heat reached out heavy fingers and dug into her flesh, pulling her into darkness. Charred gloves circled her wrists and dragged her from the wreckage as as flames swallowed the world.

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Faithful by Alice Hoffman

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
“Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 110, on the side of the road that slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are candles set inside paper bags, surrounded by the sand, and they burn past midnight. They shouldn’t last for that amount of time, but that’s part of the miracle. On the second anniversary of the accident, a gang of boys creep out their windows and gather at two in the morning to see if Helene’s mother, Diana Boyd, drives along the road replacing each melting pool of wax with a fresh candle. They’re hoping to reveal a con in process and dispel the myth of a miracle, but after keeping watch for a while the boys all flee. In the early morning hours, safe in their beds, they wonder how much of the world can never be understood or explained.

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