The Weekend

Hello friends and fellow bloggers,

I hope you've had a great start to the weekend.  It's usually a time when I run some errands that require me to venture out a bit farther than my neighbourhood shops, go to the library and/or meet up with a friend.

This week and weekend, I'm trying to finish several books that are coming due soon.  The first one is called Embers in the London Sky by 'new to me' author, Sara Sundin.  Set in the 1940s during German invasion of the Netherlands, Aleida, the young mother in the story leaves the Netherlands with her abusive husband, Sebastien and their small child, Theo.  During their escape to London, Aleida falls asleep and while she is sleeping her husband gives Theo to complete strangers for 'safe keeping'.  

When Aleida wakes up she is horrified to learn about her child.  But before she can find out the details from her husband he is killed by a bomb blast. Upon arrival in London, Aleida does what she needs to do to survive but searching for her child is the single most important things to her. The book takes us on an intense journey of Aleida's search for her child and about finding real love along the way. 

Now I'm reading Hello Stranger by Katherine Center.  This is not the kind of book I typically pick up but I wanted what seemed to be a quick read. This one has all the markings of being about romance and indeed it is, but it's much more than that. 

The young protagonist, Sadie is a struggling, New York City painter. Early on in the novel she suffers a non-convulsive seizure and ends up in the hospital.  After diagnosis she learns she has a medical condition called prosopagnosia or facial blindness where you have difficulty recognizing people's faces. This is problematic since she is a painter and she has just been accepted into a competition in which Sadie has to paint someone.  Apparently, there's no treatment for the illness so the story takes us on a journey about how she copes with life and how she enters the competition despite being unable to paint faces. 

My weekend plans include the goal of finishing Hello Stranger and making good progress on the final novel in the stack, Digging Stars which I'll have more to say about once I've finished read it.  I'm enjoying it so far.

And what about you dear reader?  What are you weekend plans?