Organic Granny

Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton   My rating: 4 of 5 stars Dolly Parton partnered up with super bestseller writer James Patterson to write this fast-moving story of a young singer-songwriter's arrival and assent in Nashville's country music scene. AnnieLee Keyes is petite, gorgeous, naive, ambitious, and altogether a 'firecracker'. But she also comes with "secrets" and a bag full of demons from her past. The reader will find that the novel is primarily a mystery story with some pretty interesting 'action' as well.  ( Click here or on image left to to to book on Amazon.ca or click here to go to Amazon.com . Because it carries a strong theme of writing music for the country audience, there is also a lot of the "values" innate to that industry: cowboy heroes, no flagged LGBTQ+ characters, identifiable violent villains, some with shotguns, and a stark contrast between the super-rich and the very poor and all that says for the reader niche. There

North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Unusual Family, and How I Survived Both by Cea Sunrise Person My rating: 5 of 5 stars Inspite of this memoir being a salacious story of the author's growing up years in the counter-culture of the late 1960s-1990s, I caution anyone against judging the narrator and her writing gifts before reading at least a good portion of her book. I found it difficult to pick up sometimes, so triggering some of the stories of parental neglect were. But the fact is that the abuse and neglect that Cea experienced--often both personally and vicariously, through her parent-child role with young mother-- is balanced with unexpected courage and resourcefulness that makes for a great desire of the reader to see how things work out. So, stick with the book. Most of us chuckled our way through the comedy-series "Schitz Creek" with its fuzzy, uncertain parental-offspring roles. Some of the same narcissism shows up in "North of Normal.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stefanie Land was a woman in her twenties, living in the Port Angeles region of Washington State (the Pacific Northwest) and dreaming of moving to Missoula, Montana to study writing at the University there. She met Jamie and they moved into his trailer. Within a short time, she found that she was pregnant. Jamie was adamant that she have an abortion. She decided to have the baby. He ultimately demanded that she leave and take the baby with her. Thanks to Land's willingness to work hard at a low-paying job as a maid, she and her little girl survived a cycle of ongoing sadness, fear, stress, illness, financial exploitation, betrayal, abuse, and other trials and horrific misfortunes. This book came to be through the author's desire to record her story of desperation and obstacles as a poor single mother in the representation of-- giving voice to-- thousands of others on the