Morning Glory

You know clichéd lines that you read so many times that it makes you roll your eyes and think, "ugh, I can never use that because it's so overdone?"  For me that is the line, "I'd read his/her grocery list I love him/her that much!"  Now, I refuse to say that but let's be real, if I did say it, I'd say it about Sarah Jio.

She is one of those authors that I kept putting off and off because I wanted to savor them and not have to wait for a new one.  However, after reading two of them pretty much back to back I can't say that I'd suggest that. 

Her books follow a pattern.  Woman in present has some kind of problem.  Enter woman from past who also has a problem.  Then they have a lot of eerie coincidences and the person from the present finds out about person from the past.  And in the end all is good.  Yay.

I love books that mix past and present.  I love mysteries.  I do not love things that tie up neatly.  Morning Glory tied up a bit too neatly but beyond THAT I loved the story.  There were some things that just were too resolved and should have been left unresolved in my non-writer opinion but that did not make me hate the book.

"Some of life’s most beautiful things grow out of the darkest moments.”

It is a book full of grief and what if's and forging the life you want for yourself even though your plan has derailed drastically from where you began.  There is hope, there is strength and there is a lot of good thinking that comes from some beautiful writing.

“You know, things fall apart. You grieve. And then you sit around and wait for things to somehow get perfect again. But they don’t. They never can. There is no perfect. There’s just different. But different can be wonderful.”

Also, I kind of want to live on a houseboat for a summer now.

Description:  New York Times bestselling author Sarah Jio imagines life on Boat Street, a floating community on Seattle’s Lake Union—home to people of artistic spirit who for decades protect the dark secret of one startling night in 1959

Fleeing an East Coast life marred by tragedy, Ada Santorini takes up residence on houseboat number seven on Boat Street. She discovers a trunk left behind by Penny Wentworth, a young newlywed who lived on the boat half a century earlier. Ada longs to know her predecessor’s fate, but little suspects that Penny’s mysterious past and her own clouded future are destined to converge.

What is your favorite book that blends past and present?