Want to Change the World?
There are self-help books with covers exhibiting time management symbols, people helping other people or a cute dog who is everyone’s best friend. Then, there are books with a fictitious character who makes you look at your life in comparison to their life’s events. Have you read anything that has made you think about your relationships, your family, why you work at the job that you do, or why you live where you do today?
I have read a few recently. Some of these books I would classify as historical fiction, yet they make you ponder your life and what you might do in certain situations.
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is one book on my historical thought provoking list. This story is about a reporter in France who is trying to dig up sensitive information on the round up of Jews in France during July, 1942. Her search for facts uncovers a link to a young girl during this "Vel' d’Hiv’ Roundup". The reporter is torn by family members and other French families to drop her search on the Vel' d’Hiv’ Roundup. The past maybe painful but knowledge can be freeing.
Another book, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow is a Bellwether Prize winning novel. A single mom from Denmark, is raising three children in Chicago, a land that she knows nothing about. Rachel, the only survivor of this family’s tragedy, is sent from Chicago to Oregon to live with her paternal African American grandmother. Most teen years are tough with so many questions of what makes up one’s identity, yet Rachel has additional factors adding to her difficult teen years. She begins to work through why people look to her family and the color of her skin for who she is or is not. Wow! What a timely read as to what is going on in the news!
What have you read that makes you think? or What 'cha Reading?
