Richard W. shared a post on November 21, 2021
Balance

Stability or Disaster?

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 33 seconds

Today, my grief feels like it will either stay stable or reoccur with a vengeance. If there is a grief eruption, will I be consumed by the flames? I prefer a stable environment to sail to the Community of Love across the open waters. Flames would stop the forward progress while it consumed me.

Walking, reading, and writing have helped me avoid the pain of failure. Now, I am being called on to engage more directly with others in grief and as a group facilitator.

Love never dies; it only grows stronger.

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Meeting Jan's Spirit!

How Did I Grieve?

If grief has made me a better person, it's because God gave me the ability to listen, embrace, and move forward into the future. Although I miss Jan dearly, I am committed to living with courage, honoring her memory, and being my best father, grandfather, friend, and neighbor.
Richard W. Brown June 24, 2024

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Balance
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These Summer Storms

Read: July 2025

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These Summer Storms

by Sarah MacLean

These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean is a poignant and thoughtful story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family—the novel delves into past secrets, present truths, and futures shaped by wild summer storms. Alice Storm has not been welcome at her family’s magnificent private island off the Rhode Island coast for five years—not since she was cast out and built her life apart from the Storm name, its influence, and untold billions.

However, the shocking death of her larger-than-life father changes everything. Alice plans to keep a low profile, pay her final respects (as complicated as they are), and leave as soon as the funeral concludes. Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric and manipulative patriarch left his family a final challenge—an inheritance game designed to disrupt their lives. The rules are straightforward: spend one week on the island, complete their assigned tasks, and receive the inheritance.

Spending an entire week on Storm Island presents challenges for Alice. The old house is chaotic in every corner: her older sister’s secret love affair, her brother displays unwavering arrogance, and her younger sister is constantly analyzing the “vibes.” All of this is under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s intriguing and too-handsome second-in-command. It will take a miracle for Alice to escape unscathed.

Sarah MacLean is the author of sixteen New York Times bestselling novels, translated into more than twenty-five languages. She co-hosts the weekly romance novel podcast Fated Mates and is a prominent voice in the romance genre. A product of Rhode Island summers and New England storms, MacLean now lives with her family in New York City.

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Western Lane: A Novel

Read: March 2023

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Western Lane: A Novel

by Chetna Maroo

Western Lane: A Novel by Chetna Maroo is a taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself. Western Lane is about three sisters who have lost their mother. Their father is encouraged to provide structure in raising his daughters. Gopi, the narrator, is a squash player, and her father imposes a brutal training regimen. I highly recommend this novel!

The following passage explains the importance of squash to Gopi and how she views the world.

In the court, your mind is not only on the shot you’re about to play and the shot with which your opponent might reply, but on the shots that will follow two, three, four moves ahead. You’re watching your opponent’s position and the game he or she is playing, making calculations. This is how you choose which way to go. Though your mind is following several paths at once, it’s not a splitting but expansion forwards and backward in time, and it happens so quickly that it feels like instinct. Sometimes, you don’t even know you are thinking.

In the first few pages, I wondered what I would have done if I had been a single parent when my sons were young. I do not believe I would have imposed on my sons what Gopi’s father did to her. However, I have found reading and art to be powerful tools to help me cope with grief. I have focused on rituals, structure, and purpose.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot, and its echo.

But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.

An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we know ourselves and each other.

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The Sorrow Apartments

Read: June 2024

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The Sorrow Apartments

by Andrea Cohen

Today, I explored “The Sorrow Apartments,” the eighth collection of poems by poet Andrea Cohen. Renowned poet Christian Wiman accurately describes Cohen’s work as a “cumulative force,” showcasing her deep attention, genuine intelligence, and soul. Cohen’s distinctive talents are featured in this collection, complemented by her characteristic sly humor, unwavering conciseness, and surprising moments of profound wisdom.

It’s astonishing how swiftly Cohen transports us:

Bunker

What would I
think, coming

up after
my world

had evaporated?
I’d wish

I were water.

The Sorrow Apartments house a collection of sparse and haunting poetry, each piece a captivating narrative of mystery, grief, and awe. These poems transport us not just across time but also through a spectrum of emotions. Cohen’s unique approach to illumination is evident in “Acapulco,” where an unanticipated companion muses, “as men tend to, / the stars comprising Orion’s belt — / as if it were the lustrous sparks and not / the leveling dark that connects us.” For a poet often deemed unfashionable, Cohen’s work proves that unfashionable can be beautiful.

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Mother Mary Comes to Me

Read: December 2025

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Mother Mary Comes to Me

by Arundhati Roy

“Mother Mary Comes to Me,” Arundhati Roy‘s first memoir, is an intimate and inspiring account of how she became the person and writer she is today. It explores how her life was shaped by various circumstances, particularly her complex relationship with her extraordinary mother, whom she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” The book has been named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of 2025 and is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

Devastated by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022, Roy experienced a mix of confusion and shame over the depth of her emotions. She began writing to understand her feelings for the mother she had distanced herself from at eighteen, not out of a lack of love, but to preserve her ability to love her. Her writing marks the beginning of an astonishing, often disturbing, and surprisingly humorous memoir that chronicles the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to her accomplishments as a prize-winning novelist and essayist, and continues to the present day.

With the scope, richness, and emotional depth characteristic of her novels, “The God of Small Things” and “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness“, as well as the passion, political insight, and warmth found in her essays, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” serves as an ode to freedom and a tribute to complicated love and fierce grace—a memoir unlike any other.

Arundhati Roy is the author of “The God of Small Things,” which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” a novel translated into more than 40 languages and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Roy has also published several nonfiction works, including “The End of Imagination,” “The Doctor and the Saint,” “My Seditious Heart,” and “Azadi.” In 2023, she received the prestigious European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2024, she received the PEN Pinter Prize for telling “urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.” She resides in Delhi.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books that I’ve personally vetted to ensure quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!

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American Dirt

Read: September 2021

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American Dirt

by Jeanine Cummins

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is one of the best books I have read this year.

American Dirt is a “cross-genre novel that combines elements of a commercial thriller, literary fiction, suspense, and romance.” American Dirt refers to the land that is the United States of America and to the difficulty undocumented migrants face both before and after crossing the border.

According to SuperSummary,

Lydia Quixano Pérez, a bookstore owner in Acapulco, saves her son Luca from a massacre that wipes out their entire family at a quinceañera cookout. The perpetrators are three sicarios, killers for Los Jardineros, a violent local cartel. Javier Crespo Fuentes, Lydia’s close friend and the jefe of Los Jardineros, ordered the hit in retaliation for an exposé written by Lydia’s husband, a journalist named Sebastián Pérez Delgado. Javier’s murderous rage stems not from the article itself, but from the impact it has on his daughter, Marta, who commits suicide when she learns of her father’s true identity. Lydia and Luca spend the rest of the novel running from Javier’s men, encountering a diverse cast of migrants along the road to the US.

I read the book at the same time that Haitian migrants were being deported at the border. Ms. Cummins writes passionately about the plight of migrants and the difficulties they face as they seek a new life in the US. This book highlighted this to me in ways that I understood intellectually but not emotionally.

Ms. Cummins refers to a sign she saw in Spanish in Tijuana while she was researching this book:

También de este lado hay sueños.

On this side, too, there are dreams.

All of our ancestors were migrants, and they all had dreams of a better life. We need to find a better way to help those who now have goals find a home so that their hopes for a better future can come true.

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What Kind of Paradise

Read: July 2025

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What Kind of Paradise: A Novel

by Janelle Brown

What Kind of Paradise is a captivating and suspenseful novel by bestselling author Janelle Brown. It follows a young woman on her quest to understand self-identity. The story boldly explores complex themes, including the relationships between parents and children, the balance between nature and technology, the tension between innocence and knowledge, the losses we experience in our past, and our aspirations for the future.

This unforgettable narrative delves into what shapes us as individuals. The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world, says Jane, the narrator.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read instead of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the fact that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Walden-esque utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager, she begins to push against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city amid a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Be You, Pretty Things, Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. An essayist and journalist, she has written for Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, Los Angeles Times, Salon, and more. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

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