The Saturday Six

One.

Source

IT'S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR!!!!!! Set those clocks back an hour tonight and get a whole extra hour of sleep in the morning. You can know we will be!! Goodbye, stinkin' DST. I might not complain about you on the blog as much as I used to, but I still don't like you!!

Two.

Source

This article is both truly informative and truly hilarious. It covers the grammar rules for writing your last name on a Christmas card without using an apostrophe {which most people use but it's not grammatically correct}. I hesitated to put this on the Six, because somebody might be planning to send me a card and will now strike me from the list, fearing I will be hiding on Mo with a red pen editing their card. I WON'T!!!! This is merely a helpful guide. The comments, though...read those for a good time. Fight! Fight!

Three.

Source

 Several years ago, I read a book written by a woman who faced an unexpected pregnancy. The book ripped me apart, because I was that baby in my family. I wrote some blog posts about it and many months later, discovered the author had found them and she left me a not-so-nice comment. I was sad I'd upset her, but I still get high blood pressure thinking about the delivery of her book. So when I found a link to this article by another mother facing an unexpected pregnancy, I was scared to click on it. But I did, and I'm so glad I did. Her words are laced with so much grace, and I appreciate the way she was able to blend honesty with kindness. I am so thankful for her approach, I can't help but share!

Four.

Source

Did anyone else LOVE Trading Spaces as much as I did? I watched it every single week from the second season on until it ended. {Most memorable episode? The one where the woman hated the brown room. I loved that brown room, but she sure didn't!} Anyway. Found this article about where the designers and carpenters and hosts are now! 

Five.

 You've been so kind to read about our vacation this week - and we have just a couple more days of recap coming up, but I thought you might like to see the VIDEO we made as well. We did about a minute at each destination and some parts of it are pretty funny. {Like when we get sidetracked by something we just said and stop to talk about it.} Hope you enjoy!

Six.

Source

I took a week of vacation from reading {when I was on vacation}, but now I'm back to reading and reviewing!

I asked to read Lauraine Snelling's newest novel, Streams of Mercy, mostly because I wanted to try something a little different in the fiction world.  Lauraine has written over 70 books, but I've not read any of them yet, so I figured it was high time I try a new {to me} author. I chose this one from the list because it had a different time period and historical background from what I normally lean toward, and I wanted to branch out a bit.

First let me give you the synopsis of the book. This is actually the third book in the Song of Blessing series, and it is set in North Dakota in the early 1900's. The little town of Blessing is getting back on its feet after an explosion destroyed the grain elevator and other buildings in town a year and a half prior. The citizens of Blessing are aching for spring after a hard North Dakota winter, and they work together to support each other as family. Anji Moen has just recently returned to her home in North Dakota from her husband's native Norway, where she lived with him and their children. After her husband's death, she brought the children home and finds herself wrestling with settling in, motherhood...and uninvited feelings for the minister in town. When a health crisis settles over the town and threatens lives of friends and strangers alike, Anji and Father Devlin find themselves wondering what the future holds for all of them.

I'll be honest...I struggled with this book. It's long {378 pages} and I was a good 100 pages in before the story captured me. Now, once it did, I was hooked. But that was a long wait to get to the capturing. And also in truth, I never did master the relationships between some of the people in the book. There are so many characters and so many relatives, and the names are heavily Norwegian, making it even harder to keep straight. To be fair, there is a family tree in the front of the book, but I didn't want to keep flipping back to it to keep everyone straight.

Maybe if I had read the first two books in the series, it would have been easier, but I finally gave up trying to keep the people straight and just tried to enjoy the story. There was also an infiltration of Norwegian words scattered throughout the conversations in the book, and while that was interesting on one hand, it sometimes distracted me from the story, because I had to stop for context clues.

The love story in the book was not as prominent as I anticipated it would be, which did not take away from the story itself, but it just surprised and disappointed me a little. I'm such a sucker for love stories. Given the ending of the book, I imagine a fourth story lurks somewhere down the road, and while I'm curious to know how some of the mysteries unravel, I'm not sure I will hunt down the fourth book to read it.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the story...I did. But I think I may have strayed a bit too far from what I enjoy in a novel's setting, so this one wasn't my most favorite I've ever read. Having said that, I do think Lauraine is a good storyteller and if the setting/historical aspects had perhaps been up my alley a bit more, and I'd read the previous books in the series first, I might feel differently about this one.

** Thanks, Bethany House, for sending a copy of this book my way to read and review. The opinions are all my own. *
*