Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Okay, folks. I’m sure y’all noticed that I did other things over most of Thanksgiving week rather than blog–things like make pies, and play games, and eat way too much pie, and spend time with family–and December is a busy month for everybody. Let’s just acknowledge, then, that between now and New Years, posts will not happen with any regular order or consistency!

Anyway. I did, however, finish Dusti Bowling’s The Canyon’s Edge this past week, and it was unexpectedly intense. Nora’s recent past is traumatic enough–her mom died in the same shooting that lamed her father–but when she and her father are separated by a flash flood during a hike in a slot canyon, she must fight her way through the desert’s dangers as well as her own (literal) nightmares to find her way back to the only parent she has left.

Okay, that sounds dramatic, which it is, but it’s NOT overly or melodramatic. It’s taut and raw and hard for a mother to read, and yet the level of triumph in adversity–rather than over–is endlessly moving. I honestly wish I could give this to both of my older daughters to read; neither, however, is currently up to that level of raw emotion. (My older daughter is struggling to regulate her mental health at the moment, and my younger daughter has been anxious since a boy in three of her classes was hit by a car and died on Halloween weekend.) At the moment I’ll have to settle for recommending it to friends and teens who don’t have extenuating emotional circumstances, because it’s completely and totally worth your time.