Joe and Krista made a deal.  Joe needs to date a "good girl" in public.  Krista needs help for the upcoming carnival to help the kids.  What they don't need?  To fall for each other.

 

Joe has been hurt before.  Now he has a reputation for sleeping around and with babies in college no less.  His friends do an intervention and tell him shape up or the money for your business cuts off.

 

Krista is not sure what to do.  She has the carnival event to plan and no help to do it with.  She tried hiring an event planner who wanted too much money.  Now she must find help however she can.  Then Joe approaches her at the library to make a deal.

 

Joe thinks dating a librarian is a good thing since she is trustworthy.  She calls him on all his crap and he finds himself oddly attracted to her.  Looking forward to seeing her on the Sundays of their dates.

 

Krista, not wanting to hurt Joe further, tries to talk to him about everyday things.  They end up getting to know one another better than planned.  She finds herself wanting to kiss him and not sure what to do except maybe stay away. 

 

Such a great story with characters from the previous boxed set, Texas Sunrise.  I loved the banter and the honesty.  Even when it hurt to hear.  Joe and Krista are meant for each other and it shows.  This is the 6th book in the Somewhere, TX series. I give them 4/5 Kitty's Paws UP!

 

 

***This ARC copy was given free from Netgalley.com and its publisher, for review purposes.  My honest opnion does not reflect Netgalley, nor its affiliates.

A Month of Sundays - Lavender Daye,R.L. ... A really sweet story. Both Krista and Joe are wary about opening up their hearts after love let them down and hurt them in a really bad way. Each deals with the heartache in their own fashion, Joe buries his pain with one night stands and Krista with isolation. Nothing and nobody can hurt them if they hide their true selves. When a situation comes up where one can help the other out, they agree to date for a month... of Sundays.

4 Sunday dates is all it takes for them to realize what they have been running away from for so long and maybe now is the time to trust someone and take a chance on love.

Free copy provided in exchange for an honest review

James Santel rereads John Updike's Collected Stories:

 

While not willing to go as far as Franzen, who argues that Updike was “wasting” his “tremendous, Nabokov-level talent,” I was surprised by how many of Updike’s stories impressed me while I read them, and how few left an impression. One can open the Collected Stories to almost any page and find a surprising metaphor, a lovely description, or a wry morsel of irony without remembering much of anything about story that contains it....

 

The curious paradox of Updike is that he made art into a craft, but only rarely did he transcend craft to achieve art. In a sense, then, the answer to Wood’s question is that beauty is not enough, at least not the beauty of finely tuned prose and vivid images that was Updike’s specialty. Art requires the wedding of aesthetics and morals, and the case might be made that the morals are more important; few people would call Dostoyevsky a beautiful writer, but even fewer would contest that he was a great artist.

 

I have long been a fan of Updike, if only because he was one of the first really serious writers I read as a teenager. (This is the same reason why I will always have a soft spot for Joyce Carol Oates.) But he writes beautifully and has more to say than he is sometimes given credit for. I prefer his novels to his short stories, which I think are more successful in avoiding the beautiful-nothing problem. One of the projects I have in mind for "someday"--most probably when the kids are out of the house--is to reread his Scarlet Letter trilogy as well as my favorite of his novels, In the Beauty of the Lilies.

April Garnet Rose is fourteen, lives with her mother and doesn't know her father. Suddenly her mother wants to move to Florida, but tells her that she will have to stay with her aunt June, who is Garnet's (her mom insists she is called that instead of April) father's sister until her mother has the money to send for her.Garnet isn't happy about this, having to stay with people she doesn't know. But it seems she has no choice. And at first she is really mad, until she gets to know her aunt, uncle, cousins and grandpa. And meets Silver.I read this book because I'm doing a 50 states challenge and this one is set in Virginia. I honestly didn't think it would be a book that I really liked, but I ended up liking it quite a bit. It definitely has a southern 50s, summer feel to it. The book is only 168 pages and so it moves pretty fast. The writing style is nice though and I felt I was able to connect to the main character right away. You're right in her head the whole time and so it was easy to experience what she felt.This book made me teary-eyed a number of times. Some parts were just so sad.I liked all the characters too. They had unique names, which I thought was neat.It's a very nice book. I'm glad I read it.

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

There is SEX in this book. There is ADULTERY in this book. There is PEEPING in this book. OMG there is also GOLF in this book which with its phallic clubs, balls, and holes is also (baffling) about SEX.

We meet Reverend Thomas Marshfield in the pages of his confessional writings from his incarceration in a country club for fallen priests and ministers where he is being punish by playing GOLF and POKE-HER with his fellow detainees. Poor guy, it is almost on par with Guantanamo Bay.



Reverend (Doubting) Thomas' troubles all begin with a crises of faith wrapped around one whopper of a mid-life crises. He falls leaps into bed with the organist at his church. The freshly divorced and emotional available, lush of hip and breast, Alicia. She proves to be the beginning and end of his attempt to break free of the shackles of his life and marriage.

Though his marriage to Jane has turned into a dusty caricature of the vibrant relationship it used to be Thomas is unwilling to be the one to destroy the ties of marriage, even though he is quite willing to tromp all over the vows of marriage. His inability to break away from Jane leads the lush Alicia into the arms of Ned Dork Bork, assistant minister. This leads to peeping (Tom) as Thomas tries to spy on the couple fueling his own jealousy and ultimately leading to the firing of Alicia from her job at the church. The wrath of a scorned woman will be visited upon the balding pate of our poor Thomas.

Frankie Harlow, staunch believer, but unhappy wife, is the next conquest for the reverend. He counsels her on her marriage, but the whole time is plotting her seduction. As it happens she is not that difficult of a quarry, and soon Thomas finds himself gazing upon the beautiful body of his desire and unable to rise to the occasion. Her belief, her faith, are stumbling blocks that will not allow him to consummate their unholy union. In desperation he tries to get her to renounce her faith hoping that will put the lead back in the pencil, but though she is willing to roger Thomas until the second coming, she cannot renounce her faith.

Thomas' affairs with Alicia and Frankie do not go unnoticed. He is overwhelmed with requests for appointments for counseling with his female flock. He becomes the Casanova of the collar. As he relays to us: "There is a grandeur of dizzying altitude in the act of placing a communion wafer between the parted lips of a mouth that, earlier in the very week of which this was the Sabbath day, had received one's throbbingly ejaculated seed."


Body of Christ?

All goes well until the now unemployed Alicia decides to go to one of the city elders, the banker Harlow, also the husband of the faith hampered Frankie, and reveals all. The shit storm that follows lands Thomas in the country club, writing his memoirs as part of his therapy and sneaking love notes within the text of those same memoirs to his jailer the previously pious Ms. Prynne.



I mentioned at the beginning of this review that GOLF has sexual overtones at least for our libidinous Thomas. He is golfing with his priestly and equally deviant companions. "Jamie Ray swings miserably but putts like an angel; I sometimes wonder if buggery hasn't made the hole look relatively huge to him. Whereas us poor c**t men keep sliding off the side, hunched over fearful as fetuses who suddenly realize they can never push their craniums through a three-and-a-half inch pelvic opening."


What a lecher you are Mr. Updike.

The New England writers John Updike and John Cheever are always a source of pleasure to me. They are talented, well educated writers, often obsessed with the most basic urges of the human condition and yet somehow putting a veneer of class on those same baser instincts that plague,uplift, and consume us all.