Reading Recommendations: On The Divinity of Second Chances, Kaya McLaren

How did it come to this?

It's a question Jade keeps asking herself about her family. Besieged by menopause, Jade's mother spends her time painting still lives of wrinkled raisins and sleeps outside on a lawn chair at night. Dad has simply checked out since retiring, lost in a world of cabinet rearranging and hardware alphabetization, while Forrest, Jade's brother, carries a terrible guilt that threatens to crush him. And then there's Olive, Jade's straitlaced sister, who has a secret that will push her parents even closer to the edge.

But there's something they all have to discover. With the help of a group of tap dancing old ladies, a sensual tango teacher , bagpipes, and a lot of luck, Jade's family is about to learn that everyone gets a second chance. And sometimes, second chances are even better than the first.

This book is certainly different-I'll let the reader decide in what way!

And, Hanging By a Thread, The Missions of a Helicopter Rescue Doctor, Emmanuel Cauchy

Buckle up tight for an adrenaline charged ride with Doctor Emmanuel Cauchy on his memorable missions with the world's busiest helicopter rescue service.

Radioed in at a moments notice, he and his team brave all conditions to reach survivors and victims, their helicopter frequently battered by winds as the pilot fights to keep control. Then the drop begins. And the fear kicks in.

Its nonstop mission after mission, from the near death experience of plummeting into a bergs chrund with a rescue victim or seeing his fellow rescuer swept off the mountain before his eyes, to the rescue of Jamie Andrew who was trapped for five days on one of the most difficult ice faces in the Alps, and the climber who survived a fall that should have killed him instantly.

Cauchy vividly conveys not only the thrill of being whirled over vast, jagged blades of gleaming ice and rock (and the heavy foreboding silence left when the thump of rotorblades disappears), but also the profound acquired sense of the fragility of life, the feeling of bones cracking and splintering in his hands as he treats a victim, and the realization that the "whitedeath" doesn't always take those she intends.

And, Broken, A Love Story, Horses, Humans, and Redemption, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Lisa Jones

Writer Lisa Jones went to Wyoming for a four day magazine assignment and came home four years later with a new life.

At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho, who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them by force. It was said that he could heal people of everything from cancer to bipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years.

Intrigued, Lisa sat at Stanford's kitchen table and watched. She saw neighbors from the reservation and visitors from as far away as the Holland bump up the dirt road to his battered modular home, seeking guidance and healing for what had broken in their lives. She followed him into the sweat lodge, a framework of willow limbs covered with quilts, where he used prayer and heat to shrink tumors and soothe agitated souls. Standing on his sunblasted porch, pit bulls padding past her, she felt the vibration from thundering bands of Arabian horses that Stanford's young nephews brought to the ring to train.

And she listened to his story. From his teenage years to present. Over the years Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places where she, too, was broken.

Broken entwines her story with Stanfords, exploring powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death, and above all else, a "love that comes before and after and above and below romantic love."

These 3 books are on the new book table available for check out.

See you at Rylander!