Now You Know

Books are good for the soul. They help us learn and they teach us new things. We can escape reality and live life through characters who allow our imagination to take over and expand our thoughts and ideas. We can indulge in our secret, guilty pleasure by reading trashy romance novels, being an adult and actually giving a damn about what is going on in a fictional teen drama in Upper East Side New York.

Some books have a whole generation of girls believing that true love is best found through vampires... well, I guess we all believe when it comes to love and our partner they can all be some sort of monster.

But some books open our eyes to the things beyond the fictional section at the bookstore. The true crime, the self-help, the biography or novel that changes your life forever.

Being as Barnes and Noble bookstore is my 'escape place' from the chaotic and cramped life of a 22 year old college student, I am intrigued by all the knowledge and wonder that is held within the massive bookstore. I grab my Chai Tea or Skinny Vanilla Latte from the Starbucks counter and I browse. And browse. And browse some more. It's mystifying and wondrous to walk down each aisle and being drawn to so many pages of other people's ideas. Enchanting, really.Needing an escape last night and with the help of a Barnes and Noble giftcard I received as a Christmas gift, I sipped on my Venti sized Chai Tea and browsed the Fiction, Biography, and Self-Help books of the store that sits on McFarland Boulevard. Two and a half hours later I made my purchase and I can't wait to finish up my studying so that I can submerge myself into someone elses reality and begin reading the novel I found.

It is called "Now You Know" by Susan Kelly. (An emotionally vibrant story of family secrets and the sacrifices that love compels us to make). Maybe I just felt connected to it as I read the summary on it's back cover or maybe there are chapters full of life lessons that I need to gain right now in my life. Either way, I'm doubtful that this will be any sort of disappointment when it comes to my pleasure seeking through paperback novels.

The summary is this: Their friendship is born an early-September day in 1947, in a freshman dorm, when the brassily Yankee and free-spirited Libba Charles meets her roommate, a near perfect flower of modest young Southern womanhood in the person of Frances Simpson; and for forty-six years it flourishes.

It ends with a promise. On her deathbed Frances extracts it from her three daughters - the utterly capable homemaker Alice; the recalcitrant Allegra, a recovering alcoholic; and bohemian Eddie, who shrinks in the face of any commitment: their promise to "look after Libba." As if formidable, tough-minded Libba Charles, author of ten book, a literary celebrity, needed looking after.

Yet when they are summoned by Libba to Creek Cabin, their mother's summer hideaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, they go. None of them is prepared, though, for what they will discover there - about their mother, about Libba, about themselves - in this poignant, adroit rendering of reunions and farewells.

The author, Susan Kelly, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill so obviously she's not an idiot and that makes me a fan of her from the start. But what compelled me to this reading was how close to home this 'emotionally vibrant story' just may be for me (figuratively and literally).

And when you're all alone in this neurotic and chaotic college world and trying to find yourself for who you are, I do not see how this book can be any sort of wasted time. I'm not expecting it to change my being in the way that Mitch Albom's "Tuesdays With Morrie" did but I do hope it helps in some way or the other.

After looking online at reader's reviews of the book I feel as if this might be something that I send to my grandmothers, my aunt, my mother and my sister - all of whom I love so much and have been most blessed and able to experience the kind of divine friendship that only comes from family and womanhood. This just might be that book that changes my life forever.

Everyone has 'that book', don't call me a nerd.

Peace and Love,

BJJ

Louisa and Clement Jardine are sisters, friends, and rivals. While both are ambitious and exacting - Louisa in her passion for art, Clem as a guardian of wildlife - they are far more different than alike. Louisa strives for the steadiness of marriage and home; Clem, meanwhile, is restless in her work and almost ruthless in love. Yet they are drawn together repeatedly by ordinary accidents of fate and by the fierce, thorny ties shared by siblings alone. In a hypnotic, moving duet that spans twenty-five years in the lives of these two vibrant women, Julia Glass once again explores the intimacies of a very particular family (often funny, sometimes shocking) as well as the nature of sisterhood itself.
- "I See You Everywhere" by Julia Glass

This is my new book that I am reading. I was so drawn to it because of the honesty it brings to the incredible relationship between sisters - whether identical twins or years different in age and galaxies different in their worlds. It is amazing that I base my blog off of my relationship with my sister - ever solemn, ever dramatic, and ever loving. I am so excited about this book and ALREADY recommend it, just by the book jacket.

Remember this, from me to you - Don't judge a book by it's cover; don't just a girl by her looks; and NEVER judge a sisterhood by their interests.
The book had me caught in the first lines.
"I'm not a rebel, a recluse, or a sociopath, and I'm too young to qualify as a crank....."

Peace and Love,
BJJ