Family | Book Chatter

Sunday Matters

Good morning!! How is everyone? Here in Southern California we are in a heat wave. We had a mild June and now, temps of 112-115. When you step outside it’s like an oven. I know some of you ADORE the heat. Me? Not so much. Plus, there’s been a fire every day! All that rain led to growth and now it’s all brown. Fire season is upon us.

My daughter arrives for a week later this month. There are some things around the house that I need to tackle before she arrives. They don’t really have anything to do with her arrival, but it motivates me. I need to work on my closet and the garage. The garage is bad. It has a lot of discards from both kids moving out.

Right Now:

Student ministry this morning, like always. It’s been a fun summer of activities and games. Some good messages too.

This Week:

At the end of the week I have a dental appointment. The brain tumor I had was so large that it pushed my palate out so my teeth don’t align all that well. I suspect my dentist will mention it.

Nothing else planned, which is nice. I do like our little road trips here and there but in 110 degree heat they aren’t so fun.

Reading:

I blew through a number of books recently and posted reviews for:

Extinction
The Summer Club
House of Cotton

I am finishing up You Like It Darker by King. And I am almost done with The Return of Ellie Black.

I just requested a review copy of Murakami’s new one, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I sure hope I am approved! You all know how much I love him!

If that doesn’t happen, I plan to pick up The Search Party to read next.

Watching:

It’s been a long time since the Hub and I have watched anything but friends recommended Alice in Borderland and so we’ve been watching an episode each night. It’s good. Along the lines of Squid Game, but Japanese. We’ve been enjoying it!

alice in borderland

Grateful for:

Biscuits. This might sound like a silly thing to be grateful for but it was the ONLY thing I could eat after surgery because everything made me sick! And now? I love them so much and this song just HITS. Yes, a biscuit song.

House of Cotton
By Monica Brashears
Flatiron Books,9781250851932, April 2024, 304 pp.

The Short of It:

Raw and brutal.

The Rest of It:

One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, Magnolia Brown encounters a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton. He offers to turn her luck around with a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home–where she will pose as clients’ dead loved ones. She accepts. ~ From the publisher

This story will hit you with a closed fist. The author holds nothing back. Magnolia’s struggle to live has her doing things that at first won’t shock you, but then as the story plays out, I found her desperation to survive shockingly sad. The people she encounters never have her best interests at heart. No. And deep down she knows it, but her walk to freedom is alarming at times. So much so that I almost put the book down more than once.

This was chosen for my book club so I felt the need to finish it and it left me in a strange place. On the one hand, the writing is peppered with beautiful moments but the story is dark, very dark. Death and decay hang out at every turn and it’s pretty explicit.

There are moments though, that reveal Magnolia’s true heart, like her relationship with a homeless man and the many memories of her grandma that are shared throughout the story. Life in a funeral home is rough and when you choose to play a dead loved one, things can get a little dangerous. Not so much the action of it, but what it does to your psyche. When you are so fully immersed in death, how do you separate life from death?

I will be honest here, House of Cotton was a FINALIST for the 2024 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and NPR’s BEST BOOK OF 2023, but it’s explicit in detail and might be a lot for someone not used to reading something so raw and ragged.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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