Skip to main content

My Review of "This Too Shall Pass"

Milena Busquets' This Too Shall Pass is a genre-bending, thrilling summer read.  Sex and death, past and present, philosophy and farce -- they're all here, in stunning array.

This Too Shall Pass introduces us to Blanca, our narrator, attending her mother's funeral.  Soon after, Blanca decides to spend a summer week at her mother's seaside house, where she juggles lovers old and new, two female friends, her own two sons and sundry acquaintances.  Not much happens:  Dinners get cooked, boats are sailed, quarrels flare, sex sizzles and ­disappoints.

The real action lies in Blanca's recollections of her mother's mostly happy life and painful last months suffering from Parkinson's disease.  It's here that the novel really captures a reader's attention for a page-turner.

In the midst of her grief, Blanca turns to sex.  But in the end, This Too Shall Pass finds Blanca uttering a truth:  "Only true love can end pain".

This Too Shall Pass is a thinking person's summer novel.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Review of "The Prayer Wheel"

Patton Dodd, Jana Riess, and David van Biema's The Prayer Wheel:  A Daily Guide to Renewing Your Faith a Rediscovered Spiritual Practice brings a long-lost diagram that can be used to structure a 28-day discipline of prayer back into the practice of modern Christian spirituality.  The diagram was found in a 12th-century German book of gospels that emerged at a rare book dealer in Manhattan in 2015.  They begin with a cursory explanation of the wheel's origins but are primarily interested in reviving the use of the wheel to guide and enrich prayer by tying each day to a different thematic element of scripture. In concentric rings representing sections of the Bible and through seven "contemplative paths toward God" arranged like spokes through the rings he wheel uses Christianity's "big ideas" about the Lord's Prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, events in the life of Christ, and the beatitudes to form a progression of prayer. The Praye

My Review of "How to Be a Perfect Christian"

At first I was a little uncertain about The Babylon Bee's new book, How To Be a Perfect Christian:  Your Comprehensive Guide to Flawless Spiritual Living .  Even the title betrays so much of what makes the website so popular:  Sarcasm and humor.  But once I started this book, I simply couldn't put it down!  There are some amazing tidbits about doctrine -- which, in an interesting way, makes you start wondering what it is that authentic Christians believe, not the cultural Christians who are the punch-line of nearly every joke in this book.  But there's a coloring page to boot! You simply cannot miss this book. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review here.

My Review of "The Tea Planter's Wife"

Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife is a fun novel that vividly depicts the 1920s.  Gwendolyn Hooper, her 19-year-old heroine, speaks for an empire-branded breed of gutsy young British women who left the security of England to embark on extraordinary adventures abroad.  Not the back-packing, "lonely planet" travels of today, gap-year kids constantly connected with the folks back home via internet and smartphones, and usually safely and predictably back home for good inside a year.  Girls like Gwen married men who made their living and fortunes out in the colonies -- or what until very recently had been colonies -- and went out to join them, standing shoulder-to shoulder with their husbands to face down hardship, danger, disease, monsoon, drought, and not least the simmering and sometimes murderous resentment of locals. That makes The Tea Planter's Wife so much more than a love story -- it's a recognition that girls like Gwen had guts, and c